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.

Trying to find the detailed story...

[IAAP]

from Samba.org ...Andrew Tridgell, who is both tall and Australian, had a bit of a problem. He needed to mount disk space from a Unix server on his DOS PC. Actually, this wasn't the problem at all because he had an NFS (Network File System) client for DOS and it worked just fine. Unfortunately, he also had an application that required the NetBIOS interface. Anyone who has ever tried to run multiple protocols under DOS knows that it can be...er...quirky. So Andrew chose the obvious solution. He wrote a packet sniffer, reverse engineered the SMB protocol, and implemented it on the Unix box. Thus, he made the Unix system appear to be a PC file server, which allowed him to mount shared filesystems from the Unix server while concurrently running NetBIOS applications. Andrew published his code in early 1992. There was a quick, but short succession of bug-fix releases, and then he put the project aside. Occasionally he would get E'mail about it, but he otherwise ignored it. Then one day, almost two years later, he decided to link his wife's Windows PC with his own Linux system. Lacking any better options, he used his own server code. He was actually surprised when it worked. Through his E'mail contacts, Andrew discovered that NetBIOS and SMB were actually (though nominally) documented. With this new information at his fingertips he set to work again, but soon ran into another problem. He was contacted by a company claiming trademark on the name that he had chosen for his server software. Rather than cause a fuss, Andrew did a quick scan against a spell-checker dictionary, looking for words containing the letters "smb". "Samba" was in the list. Curiously, that same word is not in the dictionary file that he uses today. (Perhaps they know it's been taken.) The Samba project has grown mightily since then. Andrew now has a whole team of programmers, scattered around the world, to help with Samba development. When a new release is announced, thousands of copies are downloaded within days. Commercial systems vendors, including Silicon Graphics, bundle Samba with their products. There are even Samba T-shirts available. Perhaps one of the best measures of the success of Samba is that it was listed in the "Halloween Documents", a pair of internal Microsoft memos that were leaked to the Open Source community. These memos list Open Source products which Microsoft considers to be competitive threats. The absolutely best measure of success, though, is that Andrew can still share the printer with his wife.

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!

Re:Hmmmm

[Liselle]

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.

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:The FSF shows its true colors

[Jay Maynard]

McVoy was working with the open source community. Microsoft is not.

The open source community turned on McVoy. It never had a cooperative setup with Microsoft in the first place.

Re:Hmmmm

[Knuckles]

"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.

Re:Hmmmm

[Liselle]

Larry McVoy was playing in a minefield by trusting the open source community to live up ti its commitments.

How can a "community" even MAKE a commitment, never mind live up to one?

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.

Re:Hmmmm

[iabervon]

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).

Re:The FSF shows its true colors

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

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.

Assuming you're not trolling, your argument is essentially a straw man. The reality is that the FSF is hostile to proprietary software, which should hardly be a surprise.

If the FSF were opposed to commercial software, I doubt the GPL (the current version, as well as the GPLv3 draft) would say this:

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

"How Samba was written"

[toby]

Is this the article you're looking for?

There's also Tridgell's Myths about Samba.