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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."
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.
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
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.'"
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
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
There's an easy way to answer that question... just look at his "signature"! In a shell:
man rsync
man samba
(or check out an equivalent webpage on rsync, or samba)
In the "Author" section he always writes it:
Andrew Tridgell (that's the name used in the wikipedia entry, too).
In the examples section of rsync, however, he writes:
rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~ftp/pub/samba/ nim-bus:"~ftp/pub/tridge/samba"
So I guess he uses "tridge" as a nickname for himself.
There's also Tridgell's Myths about Samba.
you had me at #!
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.
What you mean by commercial software: redistribution restricted applications sold for money. Well yeah the core principle of the FSF is to ensure that all software meets the 4 fundamental freedoms. The FSF has never claimed they aren't hostile to that sort of software business.
What they are friendly to is services based software, more of consulting nature:
-- one off apps for specific clients (client gets the source)
-- custom implementations
-- support contracts
etc...