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."

well done

[Anonymous Coward]

He is a major asset to open source

The FSF shows its true colors

[Jay Maynard]

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.

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:The FSF shows its true colors

[Knuckles]

So interoperating with proprietary software on the protocol level is now bad? Why does this apply to a free bitkeeper client, but not to a free SMB/CIFS server?

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.

Reverse what?

[Yojimbo-San]

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?

Re:Strange Politics

[Jay Maynard]

The FSF does nothing that is not political.

I'm not disagreeing that Tridge is deserving; it's just that the FSF chose to recognize him in part for work that advances their own political, anti-commercial agenda, and that is what I find offensive.

Re:Hmmmm

[MichaelSmith]

Technically, by using BK Linus made a commitment on behalf of OSDL, and hence Tridgell.

Does the commitment extend to me, a user of Linux?

I doubt that OSDL or Tridgell knowingly agreed to any such commitment.

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.

Re:Strange Politics

[SquadBoy]

In 2004 they gave it to Theo da Raadt... This is a reward with *no* history of doing what you are saying they are doing. So on what do you base this thought of yours?

Congratulations Tridge

[Anthony]

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.

Re:Free Software

[MichaelSmith]

I don't see why software should be free any more than I see why cars or anything else should be free

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.

Re:The FSF shows its true colors

[ClamIAm]

By congratulating Tridge in the way they did, the FSF shows that it is fundamentally hostile to the world of commercial software, period.

REAlly.

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. (link [gnu.org])

So, straight from the horse's mouth, we can see your argument is bullshit, "period".

Re:Hmmmm

[iabervon]

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.

Re:The FSF shows its true colors

[HermanAB]

Huh? The FSF *is* a software business. It just has different business model from some others.