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Tridge Speaks Out
Robert McMillan from Linux Magazine posted an interview with Tridge, of Samba and Tivo fame. He's one of the most important folks in all of Linux, and this interview is worth a read. He covers a lot of good material like crap code, bonobo, and what stuff in the kernel is innovative. He also talks a bit about what he might do after Microsoft drops SMB from future versions of windows.
You end up exchanging dozens of e-mails, where you say, "That's bad because of this and this," and they say, "Oh no, this programming style is great." Then you have got to teach them a couple of years of computer science so they can understand why it's crap.
As far as I know VA I.O.U. eliminated all their programmers, including the Australian group. Conspicuously absent from the interview is #1 whether he's employed and whether open source projects contributed anything positive to his employment prospects and #2 how he's handled liability for the use of Samba.
Why didn't they ask him about tivo? They mention his Tivo hacking in the into but then, leave the readers hanging.
Is here.
Hmm, you'd think a "printer friendly" version would remove JPGs of Unix-nerds. No one wants to print those out. Actually, I'd be happy if that were the only thing it did.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
All the interesting positions in Linux are taken?
In the kernel, perhaps, and low-level network services. The barrier to entry is high there, and for the best possible reasons. The OS has become a phenomenon - and very very bright people continue to contribute. Lesser lights need not apply until they're more seasoned.
But that doesn't mean that there are applications out there. Many beautiful tools exist - but truly widespread adoption of Linux will require not just killer applications, but also many, many mundane little applications to fill all the niches where little Windows apps fit.
We all know about StarOffice/OpenOffice. But. . .
A really nice accounting package? A little one, like QuickBooks? Contact managers like GoldMine? Bigger CRM applications with all the bells and whistles?
These are projects that are begging to worked on, and completed. (And yes, I know that good work is being done on all these fronts already).
And these are just the sorts of projects that would convince people (at my company at least) to ditch Windows on the desktop once and for all. Even management is becoming painfully aware of Microsoft's hardball tactics, with this latest round of forced upgrades.
There are plenty of crucial positions left in Linux development. Only the shift is now moving away from the kernel and services, and toward real business applications.
Truly an exciting time. And we're only in the 2nd inning of the revolution.
If you're a company that is trying to compete directly against a free product, you're in trouble.
Now I understand why all those Linux companies went bankrupt. They were competing against each other!
Actually, I would like to have asked him if he still receives occasional "pizza payments" for Samba.
Don't know if it still says it, but in the old docs for Samba, they used to have an address where you could FedEx pizza donations to the Samba team.
Now *that's* my idea of compensation. Free as in beer? Well, what goes better with free beer than free pizza!
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Forget all the other replies to this post. The entire idea of Linux and it's You-Want-It-You-Build-It approach is very silly. If I want a tool that I can't build, I can certainly encourage others to make it through other means of assistance, IE - software/hardware donations, monetary donations, other project investments and involvement...
Linux is being held back not only by its lack of quality offerings in a few software genres (Such as the aforementioned QuickBooks), but also by the utter *glut* of offerings in some of the other areas. It's really daunting for some people that most Linux distributions come on five or six CDs and Windows only comes on one. I thought distributions were supposed to be like customized toolsets for different people and different situations. If this is the case, then why do all the distributions have almost all the same software?
Hear hear, man. Mod parent UP.
I must say that Andrew seems to be very aware of Samba's direction and future. He also seems to be very honest about the delevopment-to-date. I really liked how he points out the learning phases, from concept to write to rewrite that Samba has taken over the years. My only concern would be that as awesome as Samba is, that Microsoft would dump the SMB protocol completely, rendering the current implementations useless with newer Microsoft OS'. Right now, my employer (like most other employers) use Windows on its servers and desktops, the only exceptions are the CAD designer's that I and my buddy take care of, but we have Samba running on our Sun E450, authenticating to our Windows PDC and it works great. It be really suck if they upgrade our Windows servers to a newer version that doesn't support SMB, but that would just be the next challenge to software developers to once again try and accomadate Microsoft, and once again prove that no matter what Microsoft does, hackers will always find a way. Hooray for Andrew and all hackers like him.
Also, you'll get some pretty heavy heat on the style issue. Casting malloc(), using redundant parantheses on sizeof (i.e. treating it as a function or macro), performing micro-operations (which the compiler/interpreter does a much better job of) are all grounds for assault.
comp.lang.c will set you straight within a couple of weeks (given you're willingness to be humiliated on a regular basis), and you'll be still be learning things after years of regular reading. Again: comp.lang.c is very strict: if comp.lang.c++ is Woodstock, comp.lang.c is a Nazi concentration camp. Okay maybe I'm overselling it a bit
As for automatic code checkers, use lclint liberally. There's also the mythical Stanford patch for gcc (at least I think it's from Stanford; one of those pretentious schools anyway) that was used to find many Linux bugs.
Seriously, just start posting random tiny (no longer than 3 or 4 small functions, or else people will get bored of reading) snippets of code to comp.lang.c. 95% of posters can't even get a satisfactory Hello World! on their first try.
Those are not fun. Amateurs/hackers work on fun things. If you want non-fun things, you have to pay someone to do it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
From the interview:
."
AT: It depends how related it is. If Microsoft does a completely new protocol, it would make far more sense to have a second package. Whether I do that package or not depends on how stupid I feel at the time.
LM: How stupid do you feel right now?
BWAHAHAHA!!
" . . . (who recently jumped ship from Linuxcare to work at VA Linux Systems) . .
I wanted his answer to be, " really stupid considering the companies I have worked for lately."
Nah, can't get that lucky.
ACK
ms introduced port 445, 'microsoft-ds', with win2k. one can completely disable netbios on a system and still transfer files, but network neighborhood won't work anymore - it's going to be a short amount of time before there's something to replace that.
Not quite. The 445 stuff is actually SMB. It's just not over NetBIOS. That little 4 byte header is left blank (or maybe it encodes a length, I don't remember exactly). And Network Neighborhood (aka Browsing) is replaced with similar functionality using Active Directory I beleive. Later versions of Samba support the CIFS on port 445 I beleive.