The Bulletin released its Smart 100 list earlier this week -- a list that magazine says is designed to recognise "those who have developed new ways of doing things that have helped, or are helping, to better lives and industry in this country". Tridgell is delighted to have received the king noodle crown.
"It's a great honour and it's really an honour for all the people who work in free software and open source in Australia," he said. "Australia has [made] quite a disproportionate contribution to open source -- far beyond what our population may indicate. It's really good to see some recognition coming from that effort."
Samba was born out the "constructive procrastination" Tridgell engaged in while doing his PhD. While he was avoiding the core work he was supposed to be doing, he belted out open source tools that have become a standard part of the Unix landscape. One such tool was "rsync" -- a program used to synchronise files between systems. The other was Samba, which he wrote for his own use. Shifting files between different types of servers was a problem for him back in 1991, so he took a practical approach and wrote software that would make it easier.
"Samba is one of the most widely used applications in the commercial environment for Linux," he said. "It ships with all the different Linux distributions ... it's very much a standard component in Linux, it's become very much a commodity item, people just expect it to be there."
As for rsync, Tridgell has drawn satisfaction from seeing it "become a natural part of the Unix toolbox".
Tridgell knows Samba has made his career what it is today. "It's had quite a significant impact. In the early days of my career it was just something on the side ... it was something I was having fun with," he said.
However since he left the academic ranks, all the commercial jobs that Tridgell has had have been in some way related to the work he does on Samba. "It certainly has influenced the sort of jobs I get and I feel very lucky to be able to have a good research position while staying here in Australia," he said.
Australia the place to be for open source?
A champion of open source software, Tridgell is also an advocate for Australian development. "Universities in Australia seem to generate a lot more free software per head than other places around the world," he said. "I think [open source development] is a scholarly pursuit in Australia in the sense that there's more of a focus in the US on software as a way of making money."
"People [in Australia] go into software engineering more because it interests them, and they have a passion for programming," he explained.
QUT's professor Bill Caelli, the head of the university's school of data communications, was a runner up behind Tridgell. He also believes Australia excels at certain types of innovation, and was delighted to see the award go to the Samba maintainer.
"I've never met him, but I know the name of course," he said. "His contribution has been most notable ... there's simply no doubt that in the Asia Pac region that Linux and Unix systems are starting to resurge again."
"His contribution through Samba ... is a major contribution to the world," he added. "We've only started to see the implications."
Back in the days of what Caelli calls "IBM and the seven dwarfs" there were problems getting systems to talk to each other. This lead to Open Systems Integration, or OSI. "OSI never really took off ... but people like Andrew [Tridgell] said 'rather than talk about it, let's go and do it'," Caelli explained.
What's next?
While he continues to work on Samba -- version four is in the pipeline -- Tridgell is playing around with methods of delta compression derived from rsync. He's also turned his attention to the problem of spam by working on "fuzzy hashes" -- a technique used to "fingerprint" e-mails.
However bringing Samba into the enterprise is his main goal. "There's a battle between Microsoft and the Linux, Samba and Apache combination and I'm trying to make Samba as good as I can so we can do well in that battle," he said.
Focusing on information infrastructure protection and security, Caelli plans to lobby the government to introduce law requiring software and hardware vendors to provide "appropriate equipment that is suitable for the use of inexpert users, particularly small business users". He also wants to see the onus placed on the vendor to "provide the appropriate quality, and the appropriate assurance".
Maybe Tridgell answers Balmer's rhetorical question of "How can you trust an open source developer?". As a consumer, I'll take the open source business model over closed source lock-in any day.