A humble request for help

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, 2003-01-09 at 02:42, Stefan Görling wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I'm currently working on a thesis investigating how Open Source is 
> affected by the influence of money and the interests of commercial 
> companies. As the SAMBA Server efforts is the foundation of many 
> companies it is interesting to study how their entrance to the scene 
> have affected the community.

I'm not sure about how it has affected the community, but my general
impression is that they have had a *massive* positive impact on code
quality.  In particular, the application of professional QA to the
products Samba is used in has resulted in many bugfixes back into the
code-base.

They have also swayed the direction of Samba development - Samba's
current level of printing support is due to the fact that Samba is used
in a HP printing product.  Likewise, our file-server and domain member 
code has improved markedly with support from the NAS vendors.

The interesting comparison is the development of Samba's PDC end, which
is largely supported by individuals, or spin-off work from other areas. 
Without the same degree of 'company with product to ship' support, it
hasn't moved as fast.  However, this isn't a complaint - I certainly
don't feel that developer time is being 'stolen' or anything.  We have
to walk before we can run, and getting a world-class CIFS server gives
us a much better basis for the PDC.

> The thesis as well as research papers surrounding it will be released 
> under the GNU Free Documentation License and as soon as the first drafts 
> are available they will be published so that the community may comment 
> upon it.
> 
> In order to improve the research, it would be great if you guys could 
> spend a few minutes on this one. I have included below a list of the 
> most active persons on this mailinglist during the year 2002. I have 
> tried to establish their employer as far as e-mail adresses and google 
> could help me out, but there are lots of unknowns, and probably some 
> errors too. So please, send me patches.
> 
> Also, if you belive that there are others who should be on this list, or 
> someone who shouldn't please let me know.  I'm missing Andrew Tridgell 
> from this list, anybody who can tell me why?

I think it's mainly that a few of us inhabit the list, and the rest get
on and actually get work done :-)

> If there are someone out there who would be willing to answer some more 
> detailed questions, such as how long they've been doing Open Source 
> development as a source of income and how they think it have affected 
> them and their efforts, please drop me a line. I'd be forever grateful. 
> I am also very interested in interviewing developers who are major 
> contributors on their free-time.

I don't mind answering a few questions.

> Andrew Bartlett,Unknown / Self-financed

Most of my interesting work on Samba has been Self-financed, but I've
done various consulting/contracting jobs related to Samba, and use it
extensively as a sysadmin.  Other than that, I'm a full time student...

> Gerald Carter,VA Linux

Jerry is now HP, along with the rest of the former VA team.

> Richard Sharpe,Pansas
> Jeremy Allison,VA Linux
> Simo Sorce,Xsec
> Stefan Metzmacher,Unknown / Self-financed
> Tim Potter,VA Linux
> Christopher R. Hertel,Unknown / Self-financed
> Jelmer Vernooij,Unknown / Self-financed
> Steve Langasek,Unknown / Self-financed
> Andrew Esh,TriCord ?
> David Collier-Brown,SUN Microsystems
> Volker Lendecke,Service Network GmbH
> Rafal Szczesniak,Unknown / Self-financed
> Jim McDonough,IBM
> Alexander Bokovoy,Sam-Solutions
> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton,Unknown / Self-financed
> Bradley W. Langhorst,Unknown / Self-financed
> Don McCall,HP
> Ulf Bertilsson,Unknown / Self-financed
> Urban Widmark,Enlight
> Mike Gerdts,Alcatel
> Luke Howard,PADL Software Pty Ltd
> David Lee,University of Durham
> Juergen Hasch,Unknown / Self-financed
> Steven French,IBM
> Andreas Moroder,Unknown / Self-financed
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Stefan Görling
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net
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