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

[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: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.