LCA 2010: an encounter with the other Andrew

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 03:51

Opinion and Analysis

Andrew Bartlett is the other Andrew. He's a team member of the famous Samba project, the brain child of the original Andrew - Tridgell.


Bartlett is one of those top programmers who still retains an air of humility. Once you've been around the block with FOSS types, you'll notice that, as with the masses, it's the empty vessels that make the most sound.

He came over and sat next to me this morning while I, along with a host of others, was killing time until the start of the first keynote address of the 11th Australian national Linux conference which is on in Wellington.

Bartlett's a friendly soul and told me that he was sure he'd spotted me somewhere. When I identified myself, he wasn't fazed. Quite a contrast to the chief technical officer of Canonical, Matt Zimmerman, who walked down a flight of stairs at top speed last evening to avoid speaking to me. Luckily, he didn't break a leg.

Bartlett works in Canberra; his employer, Cisco, lets him work on Samba 4 all the time. Cisco uses Samba but that's something Bartlett understandably can't tell me about. He works from home, with "some really nice equipment" that makes working from home a pleasure, he tells me.

At this conference, Bartlett is down to make a presentation at the Systems Administrators mini-conference. His presentation is titled " Samba4: We now do AD replication with Windows."

Bartlett was one of the Samba programmers who visited Microsoft some time ago; the visits are in compliance with a legal agreement.

Towards the end of 2007, Tridgell, and fellow developers Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke, along with some EU investigators, wrested an agreement with Microsoft that specifies that every one of Microsoft's network protocols which are used to work with Windows Server will be provided to a new body, the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation.

The agreement has a total of five years to run.

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