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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.
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.
According to his home page
Until recently I was a senior engineer in VA Linux Systems. Due to the recent layoffs at VA I am now actively looking for a job.
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.
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.