Australian Samba creator joins Torvalds at OSDL

According to a statement from OSDL -- a non-profit organisation supported by a consortium of Linux customers and vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and NEC -- Tridgell becomes the second appointed OSDL Fellow, after Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Stuart Cohen, the chief executive officer of OSDL, welcomed Tridgell's appointment, noting that Samba had "long been one of the most important open source projects" and was "a critical component for Linux in business".

Tridgell is presently focussing on the next major release of Samba, a suite of programs that allows Windows clients to access a server's filespace and printers via the SMB (Server Message Block) CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocols. That release, version 4, has five goals: protocol completeness, extreme testability, non-POSIX back-ends, fully asynchronous internals and flexible process models.

"Samba4 is reaching an important milestone as a complete rewrite of the old Samba code with the ambitious goal to be able to become an Active Directory Domain Controller," Tridgell said.

He comes to OSDL after working in research and engineering roles at IBM, VA Software, Linuxcare and Quantum. He is also a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.