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GNU is Not Unix

Tridge wins 2005 Free Software Award 117

Posted by CmdrTaco from the nobody-deserves-it-more dept.
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."
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Tridge wins 2005 Free Software Award More

Tridge wins 2005 Free Software Award

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  • well done (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    He is a major asset to open source

  • Let's not forget his gift to the Tivo hackers (Score:5, Informative)

    by jerkychew ( 80913 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:41PM (#14562169) Homepage
    Don't forget all the work Tridge did in hacking the early Tivos so we could install Ethernet ports in them! [samba.org] The guy has had quite an impact on several projects, hardware and software.

  • The FSF shows its true colors (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:42PM (#14562181) Homepage
    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.
    • 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:49PM (#14562265) Homepage
        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.
        • "The open-source community" is not a coherent whole in any way. Andrew Tridgell was not a licensee of any BitMover software. He just happened to work in the same place as one. No licensee of BitKeeper was working on that until after it was revoked.
        • Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!


          There's no possible chance that you'd predecided what you thought of this, were you?

          So go on, tell us why Tridge shouldn't have won the award.
          • You didn't read my original message, did you? I said that Tridge is deserving of the award for his work on Samba.
            • Actually, I did, it seemed to be something along the lines of "I would recognise Tridge's work in supplanting Microsoft's Windows operating system with a free replacement, but not his work supplanting BitKeeper with a free replacement".

              Because, yeah, the "community" was friends with Bitkeeper and we somehow are anti-commercial because they withdrew their free licensing deal. Or something. I don't even get your point.
            • You haven't yet explained why interoperating (by telnet, since that's what Tridgell did) with a BitKeeper server is bad and interoperating with a SMB/CIFS client is good.
        • McVoy had a license agreement with individual people, that's it. Whatever that "open source community" is you speak of, if I may myself call a fringe part of it for the sake of argument, Linus et al. surely did not represent me when they chose to go with BitKeeper in the first place.

          This is all moot anyway, since the FSF never denied [gnu.org] that it sees itself outside of any "open source community", so they would not be part of any commitment of this community to McVoy.
        • McVoy was working with the open source community.
          By demanding that kernel hackers don't work on alternative source control systems? By systematically raping the free version of BK? By refusing to export change data in an open format? By continually changing his license to prevent interoperability?

          If that's co-operation, I'll take MS's FUD, thanks.

    • No, the FSF is fundamentally hostile to misrepresenting assholes who think their shit don't stink. Here's a news bulletin for you: proprietary standards are bad, mm-kay?

      They're also fundamentally hostile to non-Free software. Not non-free, non-Free. This is a good thing. And more importantly, it's not a secret.

      • They really should pick another term besides "free", since the one they picked is designed to confuse people...but then, they've been arguing by redefinition for a couple of decades, so why should they stop now?

        Why is it that everyone but RMS and his slavish followers think there's a place for both open source and proprietary software in the world?
        • Because the FSF does not want to have anything to do with Open Source. I gave the link to the relevant FSF text in another reply. It's many years old, you should try to read it some time.
        • RMS and his "slavish followers" (I would pick "mindless" personally - not all of 'em are, but I suspect that's what you really meant - but then it's bad to assume) do have an excellent point. The software that's most fair to users is Free software. If you enjoy freedom, and dislike oppression, then using only Free software is a logical decision. Well, so long as you can still get things done...
        • They really should pick another term besides "free", since the one they picked is designed to confuse people...

          Nobody who actually takes the time to read any of the FSF's introductory material [gnu.org] (e.g. the GPL's preamble, or The GNU Manifesto, or their "What is Free Software?" article) will have any confusion about the issue. The people who are confused are those who pass judgement on things without spending more than 250 milliseconds thinking about them.

          Hell, the first thing you see when you visit the FS [fsf.org]

    • Re:The FSF shows its true colors (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Schraegstrichpunkt ( 931443 ) * on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:41PM (#14562716) Homepage
      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.
    • 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 se

      • The FSF makes this arguemnt all the time - but it blithely ignores that you'll only sell one copy, because it'll get given away or shared. You can't make money selling GPLed software.

        And no, that's not what Red Hat, Novell, et al are doing. They're making money by building and packaging GPLed software.
        • The FSF makes this arguemnt all the time - but it blithely ignores that you'll only sell one copy, because it'll get given away or shared. You can't make money selling GPLed software.

          It depends on what your definition of "sell" is. If "sell" is strictly defined as number of licenses sold, then no, it's pretty hard to live off of Free software. But there are other ways to "sell" your software. Bram Cohen lived off Paypal donations for a while, where those who gave money were "buying" continued developme

    • What you mean by commercial software: redistribution restricted applications sold for money. Well yeah the core principle of the FSF is to ensure that all software meets the 4 fundamental freedoms. The FSF has never claimed they aren't hostile to that sort of software business.

      What they are friendly to is services based software, more of consulting nature:
      -- one off apps for specific clients (client gets the source)
      -- custom implementations
      -- support contracts
      etc...
      • That spells a permanent decline in the standard of living for programmers. Of course, that doesn't bother RMS, but it should bother those of us who don't want to live like ascetics.
        • A huge number of the jobs have already been outsourced. More and more are likely to be. 10 years ago I could see the argument for programmers trying to stick with pure development jobs. Today what's the point?

          Open source software, that is low initial cost and high implementation costs strikes me as a better model for American IT workers than closed source.
    • Huh? The FSF *is* a software business. It just has different business model from some others.
    • To put it simply, well "Duhh", they are the Free Software Foundation, that is their function. Are the Republicans hostile to the Democrats (in this case one could point out they are often criminally hostile to the Democrats) or are penguins hostile to fish or is the BSA rabidly hostile to the FSF.

      Hostile in this case is just the incorrect word, the FSF, supports and promotes free software, and naturally enough acknowledges those who make signifcant contributions to it. The FSF has no real business acknowl

  • Trying to find the detailed story... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by IAAP ( 937607 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:43PM (#14562189)
    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!

  • Strange Politics (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Eberlin ( 570874 )
    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)
    • 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)

      Reading between the lines it seems to be a reward for inducing BitMover to drop their free service for Linux.

      Given subsequent events [lwn.net] with mercurial [selenic.com] I think this is probably a Good Thing (tm)

    • Look at the history of who they've awarded it to. You can't call the likes of Larry Wall 'political'.

      To say that Tridge got the award because the FSF wanted to recognise his "role" in getting rid of Bitkeeper is offensive, in my opinion - that's basically writing off all the other contributions he's made to the free software community merely to have a go at the FSF. I would like to hear people's suggestions of someone *more* worthy to win than Tridge - I can't think of anyone off the top of my head.
      • 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.

  • Awarded with... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by krunoce ( 906444 )
    Is there anything else besides a big certificate and getting your name popularized? Just curious.
    • 1. ...
      2. ...
      3. ...
      4. Win FSF Award
      5. Profit!!!

      Unlikely.
    • In this context, knowing that you have been recognized by your peers is quite rewarding.

      He was one of the people I had hoped would win, in particular because of the pro-software freedom behavior he showed during Linus Torvalds' time spent with Bitkeeper. Andrew Tridgell was working on a free software program to let users pull data from Bitkeeper repositories, despite Torvalds' protestations. I think that Tridge's reverse engineering work on Bitkeeper and in Microsoft Windows printer/file sharing is import

  • But is it Tridge or Tridgell? Is spelt both ways in the article, but in samba.org seem to call him Tridge.


    --
    Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
    • Do you think that Tridge could be short for Tridgell ? ... not much less typing I know.

    • Re:Tridge or Tridgell? (Score:4, Informative)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:43PM (#14562732) Journal
      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 [hmug.org], or samba [samba.org])

      In the "Author" section he always writes it:
      Andrew Tridgell (that's the name used in the wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org], 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.

  • Handed Out at the GPLv3 Launch (Score:3, Interesting)

    by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:02PM (#14562403) Homepage Journal

    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 [fsf.org], 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.

  • Fantastic (Score:3, Informative)

    by foo fighter ( 151863 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:18PM (#14562540) Homepage
    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.
  • Andrew helped me here and there when I was looking at the Samba 4 code. A brilliant guy obviously, and quite friendly. Go Andrew!

  • More about Tridge (Score:2, Informative)

    by aconkling ( 916504 )
    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 [wikipedia.org]
    http://samba.org/~tridge [samba.org]

  • Congratulations Tridge (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anthony ( 4077 ) * on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @07:33PM (#14563126) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • I worked off and on with Tridge at Linuxcare, then one degree of separation with work later on (Samba rocks). He is very deserving, and kudos for his view on most wordly and out-of-wordly things. DTC-Bob

  • This award is going downhill fast... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by raddan ( 519638 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @09:58PM (#14564136)
    First they give the award to a troll [fsf.org], and now to a hooligan [theregister.co.uk]. What's 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!

  • Tridge? That's a bridge in Midland, Michigan [midlandonline.com]. It's worth a visit if you're in the area, but it tends to flood in the spring.

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