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Andrew Tridgell Talks About The Future Of Samba
Spud writes "Andrew Tridgell tells us what Samba is up to in a new interview." Specifically, he talks about several new features planned for Samba 4.0, and says that the release of 3.0 will happen "soon."
...most readers have missed the significance of Samba4. Samba3 is already a better Windows fileserver than Windows, in several ways. Samba4 will give Tridge and team the flexibility to nail down every corner when it comes to compatibility and performance. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see features like distributed file stores appear out of this; y'know, rather than buy a $30,000 obsolete-tomorrow monster (and spend another $30-60,000 for MS-seats - "here's your frame, motor, panels and wheels, sir; and how many people will you be buying seats for?"), you buy three reasonable $5000 boxes and get better performance, automatic load-sharing and failover.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Frankly. you're right (and don't deserve the flamebait mods). And the ironic part is that Samba is one of the best run projects around. I have tremendous admiration for the entire team, I think they're some of the sharpest folks in the community. I admire Jeremy Allison almost more than I admire Linus, he's savvy and quotable. It's an excellent project that is solid, reliable very useful, and gains a lot of admiration for OSS in general. And what they're doing is hard. And yet I agree with you that Samba needs to die. (After helping to kill Windows, of course.)
But I'm not really worried. These guys are sharp, and after it becomes time for Samba to die (which will not be as soon as most of us might like), I'm sure they'll all find other interesting things to work on. And in the mean time, they seem quite happy to work on this currently-still-very-important software for us. Kudos to all the Samba team.