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."

Comments

Let's not forget his gift to the Tivo hackers

[jerkychew]

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.

Re:Hmmmm

[TheRaven64]

This is a GNU/FSF award, not an Open Source award. To the Free Software movement[1], being productive with proprietary software is only ever a temporary measure as (a Free Software advocate would say) the Linux kernel developers found out. By forcing the Bitkeeper authors hand, Tridge showed the world the dangers of relying on proprietary software, namely that you are at the whim of the licenser. This is 100% in line with the objectives of the Free Software movement, no matter how galling it may be to the Open Source crowd.

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.

Re:Hmmmm

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Tridge or Tridgell?

[kebes]

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.

"How Samba was written"

[toby]

Is this the article you're looking for?

There's also Tridgell's Myths about Samba.