Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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."
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
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.'"
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.
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.
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).
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 #!
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
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
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.
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!
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