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

Destructive vs constructive

[dbIII]

This is a GNU/FSF award, not an Open Source award

So they are giving him an award for breaking the terms of a licence agreement?

namely that you are at the whim of the licenser

It is the same with the GPL and there really is nothing wrong with that - if you don't like the licence you use something else.

It was a simple situation - a group that was paying Tridge had licenced the software, Tridge used it in a way that was against the licence and the software vendor took it away. Nothing practical came out of it - Tridge did not develop a replacement. Other people took steps to make something practical happen as damage control afterwards.

After things like this people still call it gnu/linux - it's time to realise that they are two different projects with very different goals and both will take steps that the other group doesn't like on the way to their goals.

FIRST P*OST

[Anonymous Coward]

ErRors. Future I conflicts that are there? Let's

Free Software

[eddygk]

Would someone please explain to me why people seem to believe that software should be free? I don't see why software should be free any more than I see why cars or anything else should be free. Maybe I'm missing the point and the belief is actually that only some types of software should be free.