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Tridge wins 2005 Free Software Award
johnsu01 writes "The Free Software Foundation has announced the winner of the 2005 Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The winner, Andrew Tridgell, wins the prize for his work on Samba, the Linux kernel, and rsync. In his work on Samba and on a free software client for the proprietary version control system previously used by the Linux kernel hackers, Tridgell furthered what has been an important goal of the free software movement since the founding of GNU --- analyzing ways for free software to interact with the currently widespread proprietary systems so people can more easily move away from those systems."
He is a major asset to open source
Don't forget all the work Tridge did in hacking the early Tivos so we could install Ethernet ports in them! The guy has had quite an impact on several projects, hardware and software.
By congratulating Tridge in the way they did, the FSF shows that it is fundamentally hostile to the world of commercial software, period. This flies in the face of denials from its supporters that the FSF isn't anti-software business.
Tridge's work with Samba is certainly worthy of recognition. It's just the way in which the FSF chose to grant that recognition that I have a problem with.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
BUT, the real story is REALLY interesting...and I can't find it, now! The story talked about how he experimented with all of the bits and bytes to get the software to work. A lot of stuff in the beginning was hard coded and everytime MS released a new version, he had to rush to fix shit, until he figured out how things really worked.
Shit! I wish I could find that story again. It really explained how to reverse engineer stuff!
Last year I remember reading Theo won, and being surprised and thinking what an excellent choice for this award.
This year I read Tridge has won, again I am surprised by the selection but absolutley pleased by an excellent pick.
Both of these characters have exhibited excellence and an attitude of not being afraid to buck the system when asked to stifle their beliefs of what free software actually means.
Now was this award for his work on SAMBA or his smallish part in the whole bitkeeper debacle that led to git?
I truly do appreciate everything SAMBA has going for it and hell, hats off to Tridge, but is it kinda weird that FSF gives him this award after being almost blamed for the bitkeeper diplomatic breakdown? (especially with how vocal RMS was regarding bitkeeper's use in Linux development)
Oh, come off it already. Linus was playing in a minefield by using BitKeeper and trusting Larry McVoy. If Tridge didn't step on a landmine, someone else would have. Kudos for him for doing what he does best.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Larry McVoy was playing in a minefield by trusting the open source community to live up ti its commitments.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Of course, an alternate headline could have been 'Stallman Gives Torvalds The Finger.'
[1] Bruce Perens, if you're reading this, don't try telling me that they're the same. Only people in the Open Source community believe that, not people in the Free Software community, and if they were truly the same then both sides would have to agree.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Is there anything else besides a big certificate and getting your name popularized? Just curious.
"The open source community" had no commitment to McVoy in any shape, way, or form. Only the individual people accepting the BitKeeper license (i.e., not Tridgell) had a commitment.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
No. He didn't force them off anything - he gave them a Free tool to use instead of a proprietary one. BitKeepers creator was the one who forced them off BitKeeper.
I want to make a car-comparison here, but it's been done too many times by now. Instead, I'm just gonna ask moderators to mod you down, troll.
Larry McVoy got a bunch of cheap advertising for his software, then he threw a hissy fit when someone tried to interoperate with it. He's a twit.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Oddly enough, I consider myself part of both communities, yet I can tell the difference. I promote Free software in cases where it makes sense, but I always promote Open Source. Naturally, in my ideal world, all software would be both.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Technically, by using BK Linus made a commitment on behalf of OSDL, and hence Tridgell.
But is it Tridge or Tridgell? Is spelt both ways in the article, but in samba.org seem to call him Tridge.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
IIRC the proper description of Tridge's investigations into BitKeeper wasn't "reverse engineering", but discovering the "help" command when telnetting to the BK server.
Which version of history are we now supporting?
Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim
This was actually awarded ages ago (OK, more like a week ago) at the GPLv3 launch. I happened to be sitting one row in front of where he was sitting when they called him up (which was kinda neat, I guess). I never did get to see what the actual award was there because the thing was rolled up, and he never unrolled. So it's nice to see the picture on the website.
I'll have to check to see if I have any pictures of the award ceremony. I think I might have one of him actually holding the thing. However I haven't gotten around to dumping my camera yet, so I'm not sure.
They should also be announcing (any day now) the winner of the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, which was also awarded at the GPLv3 launch. If I had been paying closer attention, I could tell you if it was Wikimedia that won, or Wikipedia. I think I also have pictures of that award being accepted.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
He also showed me how dangerious it is to deal with one particular licenser.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Does the commitment extend to me, a user of Linux?
I doubt that OSDL or Tridgell knowingly agreed to any such commitment.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
1. ... ... ...
2.
3.
4. Win FSF Award
5. Profit!!!
Unlikely.
Very informative. I didn't know that :)
Its a shame because Linus has actually made a tremendous contribution to free software. An award for him from the FSF might actually get the FSF into the popular media.
And BitMover could have been the BitTorrent of the source control world, if they had opened their protocols. Instead we get this security by obsurity bullshit from them.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Go Tridge! Hes from the same town Im from... good old boring Canberra :)
:)
My Dad sometimes plays chess with him(if you dont know Tridge is into chess and has written a chess engine called KnightCap). Apparently the last time they play Tridge kick my Dads ass
Samba is one the most important open source software projects. It's up there with the various open operating systems, apache, etc.
Anytime the creator and developers of this project get recognition it's a good thing.
I, for one, can hardly wait for a stable release of v4.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
They're actually significantly more productive using git than they were using BitKeeper. To some extent, this is because more people are comfortable using git, so there's more uniformity of process. To some extent, this is because git is faster for some critical processes. To some extent, this is because people have tools for git tuned for their own use (because they can). To some extent, this is because people continue to work on the maintainability of the kernel, so productivity improves over time, tools aside.
As far as I can tell, the switch took a lot of Linus's attention, so nothing got done on putting changes in for a month, but development continued approximately as before, and then there was a period where Linus was applying patches blazingly fast, because they'd been developed and tested while he was doing git (and he designed git so he could apply and commit patches faster than 1/second).
I love Samba, I love Andy! /cheerz
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
Giving Tridge the FSF award is like giving Chewbacca the rebel alliance award.
Andrew helped me here and there when I was looking at the Samba 4 code. A brilliant guy obviously, and quite friendly. Go Andrew!
So they are giving him an award for breaking the terms of a licence agreement? (...) a group that was paying Tridge had licenced the software
Tridgell never entered into a license agreement with BitMover, and whether license agreements entered by other ODSL employees extended automatically to Tridge is pretty questionable.
if you don't like the licence you use something else.
Right, sourcepuller.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Seems I'm the only one around here who doesn't know who he is.... So here's the skinny:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell
http://samba.org/~tridge
Last time I looked at his ccache sources (http://ccache.samba.org/) I thought they were a right dog's dinner; not at all an impressive piece of open source software on the software engineering front.
There's also Tridgell's Myths about Samba.
you had me at #!
> anti-commercial agenda
They're not anti-commercial so much as they're against insanely restrictive software licenses. The "you can't work on any competing product" clause of BitKeeper has, in my non-lawyer mind, an unfavorable comparison to some of the terms of Sony's EULA. You know, the ones Sony stipulated to be unconscionable in the settlement...
They don't have a problem with people making money. They just have a problem with the way some people choose to go about that. And if you have to screw over a few greedy bastards to get them to play nice, so be it.
bk tries to be all things to all developers. Git only tries to be exactly what the Linux Kernel project needs. A major point McVoy missed when slagging off the git developers is that a particular solution for a particular problem can always be developed faster than a general solution for all problems. Git being useful for anyone else is gravy.
Look, all things aside, Tridge was being an asshole. he's like the guy that shows up to a party and trashes the place, since, after all HE wasn't the one that agreed to pay the costs if there was any damage. he's perfectly in his rights, right?
Tridge knew the terms under which BitKeeper had been licensed to the kernel development team. And, even though he wasn't using it, and hadn't agreed to them, he knew what his actions would cause. He deliberately forced the issue, effectively making the decision for everyone.
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Ahh.. anusol. Lovely.
Sensible, Passionate, Helpful, Friendly, Intelligent, Communicative, Considerate. These are not the criteria for a FSF award, but these are the attributes that comes to mind from the years I have known Tridge. A driving force in the formation of CLUG and getting Linus to visit Canberra all those years ago. Of course he is not a god, but he is certainly deserving of any award the world chooses bestow upon him.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
I worked off and on with Tridge at Linuxcare, then one degree of separation with work later on (Samba rocks). He is very deserving, and kudos for his view on most wordly and out-of-wordly things. DTC-Bob
Thank you!
Cars are free in the sense that you can examine components and build your own extensions to them. You don't need permission from Ford to build and sell towbars for Ford cars.
Binary interfaces make this next to impossible with software.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yes, leaders tend to do that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Also, treating software like a "thing" violates basic economic laws. For example, when Chevrolet sells you a truck, it costs them a lot of money to make that truck so the incremental cost is quite large. When Microsoft sells you a copy of Windows, the incremental cost for producing that copy is effectively zero.
That's not what I meant. Your Ford vehicle will initially cost you $20,000 and then you can do what you want to it. In that sense, it is free. You are free to modify it. What I am referring to is that some people seem to expect the initial cost of aquiring software to be zero, which doesn't make sense. Not many people are interested in donating a lot of their time outside of whatever they do to make money, in order to provide people with free software.
From the Debian project's "about" page:
Most software costs over 100 US dollars. How can you give it away?
A better question is how do software companies get away with charging so much? Software is not like making a car. Once you've made one copy of your software, the production costs to make a million more are tiny (there's a good reason Microsoft has so many billions in the bank).
Second, relying on non-Free software to store your documents is not a very good idea. It's a bit like instead of buying a book, you buy a machine that reads specially-formatted books. But when buying the machine, you have to sign a contract that says you will never look inside these special books or the machine to learn how they work, and the company that you buy it from has the right to stop supporting the machine or your special books at any time. And when they stop supporting your machine (don't worry, they will) and the machine breaks down, you'll have no way to fix it.
These are not the only reasons Free Software is a good idea.
he's perfectly in his rights, right?
no, he's guilty of vandalism, regardless of who's taking responsibility. Your analogy is crap because if McVoy didn't exist, nobody anywhere could reproach Tridge for his actions.
If you're going to be elitist, it would help to be elite.
Well, git actually tries to be sufficiently customizable that you can use it however you want, and it's just that the first set of git scripts people would actually use were done by Linus for his own use. Then they were followed by Jeff Garzik doing his own scripts (he maintains a ton of little trees, rather than one big one), and more people doing scripts for the use of individual developers, users who want to help with debugging, and now people with entirely different sorts of projects. It's following the UNIX way, based on the idea that, if you give people all the parts, they'll be able to build a better selection of things than you could build for them. You don't have to solve all problems, you just have to make sure that you don't rule out solving any, and someone will solve each problem when it comes up.
In all seriousness, though, I just set up a diskless router based on OpenBSD that saves its state to flash using rsync. So these awards are spot-on, at least as far as I am concerned. And on the heels of Samba 4, too. Great work, tridge!
Free (as in Beer) is a side affect of Free (as in Freedom). I have to have the source to be free to modify it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you use the software (even if you telnet to the port it listens on and type "help") you should respect it's licence if you expect others to respect yours. Now Tridgell may not be the sort of person that respects licences and may have had to go around a few to give us Samba - but the FSF expicitly stating that they are giving Tridgell an award for this action is a sign of hypocracy since enforcing the GPL is their main purpose for existance.
Software is infinitely reproducable for free. That is given one copy I can make a million more at almost no cost. That isn't the case with commercial goods. This means that in a natural economy I wouldn't use the same pricing mechanism for software as for cars. Rather I'd use some mechanism where for cars I spread the costs out over each individual car while for software I'd need a different economy. Attempting to price software like cars neccesitates a great deal of government interference and the negatives of this can often outweigh the benefits.
OSDL never signed a contract. An employee has to present themselves as a contracting agent for a company to be held liable for thier contractual actions. That is:
1) I work for Burger King3
2) You work for Ford
3) I agree with you that Burget King should promote Ford cars. I never indicate to you I have authority to negotiate on behalf or Burger King.
4) You give me $50 and say "I'm glad we have a deal"
5) Burger King doesn't promote Ford
6) Ford sues Burger King based on the contract
7) Ford loses since there is no contract with Burger King.
2003 Alan Cox
What do you think Cox got the award for? Clearly the FSF recognizes the importance of Linus's work.
Tridgell didn't use the software, so why would he have anything to do with its license?
What Tridgell did was access packets being transmitted over a network and access ports on a computer with the permission of the computer and network owner. From this information, he reverse engineered how the bitkeeper client worked without ever touching the bitkeeper client.
If you think this is inappropriate, i hope you aren't using Samba, because that's exactly the way samba was created.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
In this context, knowing that you have been recognized by your peers is quite rewarding.
He was one of the people I had hoped would win, in particular because of the pro-software freedom behavior he showed during Linus Torvalds' time spent with Bitkeeper. Andrew Tridgell was working on a free software program to let users pull data from Bitkeeper repositories, despite Torvalds' protestations. I think that Tridge's reverse engineering work on Bitkeeper and in Microsoft Windows printer/file sharing is important (perhaps there are other reverse engineering projects I'm unaware of as well). Hence, I'm glad he won.
Digital Citizen
I understand what you're trying to say, but most Free Software advocates (certainly Stallman, but many others as well, including myself) would say that your advocation of Free Software "where it makes sense" puts convenience above principle, which is the "Open Source compromise" in a nutshell. This places you, at least from the perspective of Free Software advocates, firmly in the OSS camp.
You say you understand the difference between the two, and yet see yourself in both camps -- lots of OSS advocates say this. But when it comes right down to it, the Free Software movement is about eschewing proprietary software from our lives, even if it makes our lives more difficult or results in decreased efficiency. The fact that free software happens to often be better quality than its proprietary counterparts is a welcome thing, but even if it were far less stable and much less feature rich -- as GNU/Linux certainly was when I started using it exclusively -- a Free Software advocate would still advocate it, because it's ultimately a question of principle, not a question of convenience.
Simply put, from our perspective, it always makes sense.
Not many people are interested in donating a lot of their time outside of whatever they do to make money, in order to provide people with free software.
However, the very existence of free software is evidence that a sufficient number of people are, even discounting the fact that many people are actually paid to produce free software.
Also, bear in mind that most of the cost of the Ford is for the physical object, not the design, whereas for software the cost of the physical object may well be nil and it is only the design phase that requires labor/money.
What would a Ford sell for if there were Star Trek type duplicators?
Well, actually, quite possibly a lot because Ford would at least attempt to buy legislation to make their use restricted/illegal.
See Microsoft, et al.
KFG
Logging in and typing "help" IS using the software. Please at least get familiar with the major details before saying something did or didn't happen
as you yourself pointed out, he telnetted to a port and typed "help". that no more binds him to the license for the software than i am bound to sendmail's license if i telnet to it's port and play with the available commands. If I were to telnet to a public port on a machine a friend owns and play around with the commands available to me, and it happened to be the port bitkeeper runs on, how does that make me subject to a license i've never seen and never agreed to?
Tridge was considered to be bound by the licence because he was working for a company that was granted a licence.
Tridge was considered to be bound by the license by Bitkeeper's assertion. I've never seen anything that said OSDL agreed to any licensing terms involving Bitkeeper or that Linus was allowed to agree to licensing terms on behalf of the company and its employees. Linus was bound by the license and he was the one granted a license. Unless you can provide some documentation to support that OSDL had agreed to any licensing terms with Bitkeeper, I cannot see any way that Tridge was bound to any agreement with Bitkeeper.
If I was to consider myself legally free to make copies of MS Windows software purchased by my workplace it would be just as stupid as those who are saying Tridge didn't break the licence.
show me anything that says OSDL purchased any licenses for Bitkeeper. Show me anything that says the licensing agreement between OSDL and Bitkeeper bound all of the OSDL employees to its terms, even the ones who didn't use it.
Your analogy also fails on the fact that Tridge never possessed a copy of any software made by Bitkeeper.
Please bother to actually read the entire previous post where I mentioned Samba.
Actually i did read what you said about Samba. I fail to see how Tridge violated any licenses creating Samba too.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Not quite... you can make towbars for cars because you can see and touch the car. You can do the same for proprietary software. However, most EULAs disallow this. Its as if when you buy a Ford, you agree only to buy accessories for your Ford from the dealer or have Ford sue you and take back your car. (You don't own the car, you have only purchased a license to use the car.)
How was he to know that? He was just trying to reverse engineer the protocol, why should that lead to McVoy not allowing the kernel people to use it? What does he have to do with the people who have accepted the license?
I am trolling
Equating Alan Cox to "Linux" in that context just supports the theory that they'd rather award Linux dude #2 an award for Linux than "the man" because they don't like him personally...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Tridge? That's a bridge in Midland, Michigan. It's worth a visit if you're in the area, but it tends to flood in the spring.
-Rich
My guess is that Alan Cox is not a household name. But lets assume that were the case.
Guy #1 manages the project but on the whole opposes the goals for the FSF. The award would do nothing for him.
Guy #2 wrote many of the key components and does a lot of work intigrating with other open source projects and assists the goals for the FSF. The award will have a strong impact for him.
Is it so unreasonable to pick guy #2?
Prior to licensing BitKeeper to the kernel team, it was made very well known that the license was valid so long as nobody tried to reverse engineer it. He knew that. What's worse, is that he even AGREED to stop reverse engineering it while the matter was discussed, but failed to do so and kept up.
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Personally I see OSS as a stopgap in between closed and Free. Even if the whole world decided to move toward FOSS tomorrow, we'd still have to deal with proprietary, closed software for a little while, until we got everything cleared up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thanks, your post saves my evening from quite some googling :)
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns