Thankyou for 20 years of Samba!

[Stefan (metze) Metzmacher]

Hi 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.

It's really impressive to see what happened to the tiny
~ 50k server.c from
http://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/old-versions/server-0.5.tar.gz

It was a spark that changed the life for a lot of people
and ended up with inspiration ping-pong within the group,
which now forms the "Samba Team".

It's really a lot of run working on Samba (as a team) and
I'm more than happy that I can base my day job on Samba!

> 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.

It's currently very flakey and sometimes causes a bit of pain,
but it really helped to find real bugs and avoided even more pain
of fixing trivial bugs developers (including me:-) put into the tree,
without careful testing.

> 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. 

Coding is easy and I'm really thanksful that you (together with Jeremy
and Volker)
took care of the legal aspects related to our technical work!

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

It's always a great pleasure to work with you and get inspired by your
ideas.

Thanks!
metze

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