Tridgell and Samba Recognized

An anonymous reader writes "It's official, Samba creator Andrew Tridgell is Australia's smartest man... in IT anyway. He's received Bulletin magazine's 'Smart 100' award for the IT sector. He's also written about how Samba came into being, which was basically because he was trying to avoid doing any real work on his PhD. He also tells us how he discovered Linux and why he believes Open Source Software is superior to proprietary code... He also talks about rsync and his plans for the future..."

Comments

I find his argument somewhat strange.

[airrage]

I am not an OS zealot. I enjoy the sunshine too much to worry about media drivers and file systems. However, Mr. Tridgell makes several comments I find incongruous:

First, he talks about his first attempt at Samba, "It really wasn't a very good piece of code, and it certainly wasn't very reliable, but the important thing is that I then decided to release it to the world for free.".

So from this, it would seem he would be arguing that it was bad code, written sloppily; but that released into the "wild" so to speak, it would return a better thing. I assume much like the peer review / criticism so normal in academia. Okay, I think I'm with him there.

Next, Mr. Tridgell talks about proprietary software and states, "We now have large numbers of programmers reinventing poorly designed bits of software, most of which will eventually be discarded and lost forever."

So, it's the "proprietaries" as I will not call them that only write bad code? Didn't he just suggest that his first attempt was poorly written. Or maybe he's arguing that it's continually poor no matter how many times it's re-written.

Finally, he states, "At the moment I'm working on Samba version 4, which is a rather major rewrite..."

It just seems to inconsistent. Bad code was sent out into the world and returned voila -- bad code. Why would Samba need a major re-write if the code weren't properly written in the first place? Isn't this just like a rewrite of Windows? It seems from his comments, that bad code won't be magically fixed in the world of open-source and I think it's not necessarily true that closed-source will just turn out garbage over-and-over again.

What you could argue is that samba and all open-source derivatives are more micro-economic driven. That, in the end, might be a good thing.