Thankyou for 20 years of Samba!

[Andrew Bartlett]

Tridge,

With Samba well on its way to a third decade as of January this year, we
wanted to thank you personally for your mentorship, guidance and
leadership of the Samba project over the past twenty years. For the past
decade, we have personally witnessed the strength of your technical
innovations, and your passionate commitment to free software. The Samba
Team and project is immeasurably stronger not only because of your
amazing technical skill, but also by your dedication to the cause in the
legal arena as well. 

The technologies you built and built with others continue to underpin
Samba, from talloc, tdb, tevent, ldb, CTDB, our IDL generated code base
to the Samba build system and so, so many other technologies that form
the very basis of Samba. We are blessed to be able to build on this
incredible work.

And as we build on that work, we continue to honour your passion and
belief in automated testing - no change, no matter how small or
insignificant enters Samba's master tree without passing almost two
hours of automated testing. Your dedication in setting up this
infrastructure and drive to ensure it's adoption has done more than
perhaps any other single action to improve the quality of Samba.

For us, your passion for automated testing has been infectious, and we
are proud to have carried that passion as we brought Samba's test system
from shell scripts around smbtorture to the full selftest and subunit
environment we enjoy and rely on today.

Your efforts with the European Commission's case against Microsoft are
not so well known outside the team, but without that victory we would
not have the documentation that we now so clearly rely on. 

Your struggle against software patents is also less well known, but we
admire the passion with which you attacked issues such as the FAT
patent, applying your unique talent as both a bush-patent-lawyer and
artful programmer to some of the thorniest problems in our legal and
technical landscape. 

But above all of this, you have been a great friend, advocate and
mentor,

Andrew Bartlett and Jelmer Vernooij

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org