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Jean-Loup Gailly Named CTO of Mandrakesoft
Neil99 wrote to us with the news that Mandrake has announced Jean-Loup Gailly will be joining them as CTO. He's the author of gzip, and co-author Zlib. Very interesting - makes you wonder where they will be going next.
Writing gzip does not an executive make. What has he done?
How about the best compressed Linux distribution?
"Yes, we have invented verygzip, the new infinite compression algortihm. Full Mandrake install from one 5,25 inch 360 kb floppy disk."
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You may like my a cappella music
With Mandrake coming into the Distro market a little on the late side and Corel et. al. stealing their thunder as the "easy" Linux install, it would seem to me that this is just a matter of trying to get their company some street cred among the debian/slackware people out there. Plus, Jean's gotta eat too....
It is a known fact that whatever distro the alpha geek uses will eventually be adopted by the others. Around here it's Suse. Why?? They kept shipping me free versions. By the time they stopped, I was so used to their distro that I didn't feel like changing. So when my co-workers ask me how to set up any of the Red-Hat tools, I have to tell them I don't know. Result? Around here, Suse = Support.
It's just a wild guess that ESR wasn't available, or was too expensive...
~Jason Maggard
"You are using Pharlap on 172.16.63.81
Dig this stone cold funky groove baby!"
~MOTD
Redhat replaces it's CEO, and then Mandrake goes and gets a new CTO. Now, I know open source is cool, and lets you copy other's ideas... but perhaps we're taking this alittle too far here? =)
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I had been a staunch user of Phil Katz' PKARC package after he significantly improved the original ARC program in the mid-1980s. Then the guy in New Jersey who wrote ARC got in a totally unnecessary fight with him over whether Phil had copied his code instead of reverse-engineering it (welcome to the world of "share" ware). Phil then decided to revamp the whole project and wrote the PKZIP package which stormed the BBS world in the late 1980s and has proven to be stable and solid up to the present day. Check out his company, PKWARE for more info.
Then, in 1990, due to its success in the PC world, a number of people decided to try and port it to other platforms. To his credit, Phil gave the project his blessing and thus Info-Zip was born.
Info-Zip was the first net mailing list I ever signed up for, way back in 1990. (The second was RISKS-L, and then the mail deluge really started!) Jean-Loup Gailly was one of the leading developers along with Kai-Uwe Rommel, Mark Adler, Rich Wales, Greg Roelofs and many others. I was just a lurker, cheering on the gang, and they did in fact port the zip and unzip program to just about every platform imaginable (whence the motto, "The only program that runs on more platforms is 'Hello world'!)
Zip is the unfortunately rare example of a tool that matured and then was left alone. No bloat, no flaky extensions. It just works. I have zipped literally several million files into many thousands of archives over the years, and never had it fail, not even once (disk corruption issues aside). I've archived files of 15 bytes and 1500 megabytes. The encryption is reasonably good; it took the likes of Paul Kocher to really break it. It's efficient; some have been able to exceed its compression and speed abilities but it's solid and reliable enough that no other program has ever challenged it as the supreme cross-platform file archive utility.
The other notable thing about Info-Zip is that it was really one of the very first true "bazaar" style development projects on the net, combining the talents of programmers from all over the globe through what would now be considered ploddingly slow email and list connections. Info-Zip precedes Linux itself and many other similar development efforts by at least a couple of years, and hearkens back to RBBS as the true originator of distributed development of free software. Read all about it at the Info-Zip home page.
Jean-Loup was a key contributor to the success of Info-Zip as both a programming project and a new kind of development project literally spanning the globe. So if you don't mind, this is a big "hooray" for this news. I hope he does well at Mandrake, which is clearly meeting a need in the end-user market as Linux pushes outward past the "server-only" typecasting that certain industry pundits and major companies want to confine it to.
Allez!
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Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.