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Interview with Andrew Tridgell
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "See here for a *great* interview with tridge. My favourite quote: 'In 50 years' time I doubt anyone would have ever heard of Samba, but they'll probably be using rsync in one way or another,' Tridgell says. Cheers, Jeremy."
Okay, so how long until Samba is able to use the rsync protocol for file updates? That depends on what Microsoft decide to do I guess.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'd just like to say a REALLY big thank you for the time and effort you've spent working on Samba. It has been a huge benefit to me both personally and professionally, and I am taking this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude.
:)
Andrew, thanks for envisioning this project, and getting up all started. Thanks also to your wife for putting up with it, I'm not sure mine would have
The developer list is growing, and I've never even read messages from some from some of you, but it's worth taking the time to personally express thanks as individually as this forumn allows.
Jeremy Allison
Andrew Tridgell
John Terpstra
Chris Hertel
John Blair
Gerald Carter
Michael Warfield
Brian Roberson
Jean Francois Micouleau
Simo Sorce
Andrew Bartlett
Motonobu Takahashi
Jelmer Vernooij
Richard Sharpe
Eckart Meyer
Herb Lewis
Dan Shearer
David Fenwick
Paul Blackman
Volker Lendecke
Alexandre Oliva
Tim Potter
Matt Chapman
David Bannon
Steve French
Jim McDonough
*Luke Leighton
*Elrond
*Sander Striker
Thank You. You have done a great service for us all, and we are very much in your debt.
Kevin Anderson
Indeed. An often-times overlooked benefit of open-source is the exposure a product can attain simply by virtue of being open. A closed source product team has to make an investment in a quality assurance group, which usually works 9 - 5. An open source project (assuming it is highly visible) is capable of leveraging a global supply of quality assurance engineers to test their product 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The whole world is essentially their beta testers.
While the Samba folks have done us Linux folk a tremendous favor (reverse engineering *any* protocol is difficult) in encapsulating all of the SMB details via Samba, they have also performed a huge service to MicroSoft and the rest of the closed-source world by hammering on the various platforms that come out of Redmond. As the article points out, every new version (or patch release) is put through it's paces against Samba. Although their primary goal is to ensure compatibility, the secondary effect is extremely valuable to non-Samba users: bugs in server software from a closed source vendor are exposed (and hopefully fixed).
The difficulty is that the rest of the world (and probably MicroSoft in particular), either doesn't see, or see's but turns a cold shoulder none-the-less to the open source community.
Thank you Andrew for your work and the work of your team.
Do it for da shorties
Is that with all that tremendous increase in power comes equally large increases in volume of data. When getting the weather report means downloading data every second or so from a few million collection devices around the world so that your GPS watch can run a global weather simulation to tell you what weather will be like throughout the day within a 1 mile radius, then yes, rsync (or its distant children) will still be quite useful!!
Not to mention fully volumetric video feeds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, fifty years is a damn long time, so who knows.
:-) Check out his thesis at http://samba.org/~tridge.
That said, historically raw computing power has increased more rapidly than network bandwidth. Rsync is essentially about using compute power to save bandwidth, using hashes and checksums to avoid transferring unnecessary bytes. So the cost/benefit will likely still hold. The network may be faster, but the files will be bigger and the CPU will be faster still.
That said, rsync as a command-line utility will almost surely be gone, but the ideas in rsync may well migrate directly into the application layer or even the network stack. At least, it's more likely to be around than samba, which is a fantastic yet special purpose tool for a specialized problem (Windows compatible file-sharing).
Besides, tridge got his CompSci Ph.D. for his rsync work, so nobody should be surprised he's proud of it.
Matt
I think you're making some unwarrented assumptions here. Why should a free implementation of SMB upset RMS? It's better than a non-free implementation of SMB. If you're in a position where you can control what you're running on your organisation's file servers, but you can't control what's on the desktop, using Samba is currently the only ethical course of action available to you.
What might even be better, or at least ethically equivalent and practically easier, is to have a free software implementation of NFS for non-free platforms like Windows (I'm not aware of any), as you don't have to reverse engineer, and re-reverse engineer every couple of years, a secret, proprietary standard to make it work. And it means that some proprietary networking software on the client machines has been replaced by free software.
The article is actually quite good (the AFR is the only Australian paper worth reading). It uses the term "free software" several times and doesn't even mention that "open source" fad from a couple of years ago. Whatever happened to that, BTW?
How about that this story got a WHOLE PAGE in the Australian Financial Review (and the picture of tridge was half the page).
This isn't a tech piece on Linux Orbit.
this is a mostly technically literate puff piece on linux in the newspaper that the suits of a modern nation read (roughly equivalent to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times).
thats what's newsworthy about it.
Plus Tridge lives in Canberra so he's all right unlike the rest of you bastards who pick on us (sorry, local grievances there).
'There is a Light that never goes out.'