Samba Creator Andrew Tridgell Joins OSDL

BEAVERTON, Ore., Jan. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, today named Samba creator Andrew Tridgell, PhD, as the Lab's second appointed Fellow. Tridgell joins Linux creator Linus Torvalds as an OSDL Fellow, positions created by the Lab to allow strategic developers to focus exclusively on their development and coding contributions to the open source community.

As an OSDL Fellow, Tridgell will continue to lead global development work for the open source Samba project. Licensed under the GPL, Samba is a suite of programs that allow Windows(R) clients to access a server's filespace and printers via the SMB (Server Message Block)/CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocols. Tridgell first released Samba in January, 1992 as an SMB server for UNIX. Samba, used by millions of people around the world, runs on Linux and most enterprise operating systems.

"Samba has long been one of the most important open source projects and it is recognized as a critical component for Linux in business," said Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. "We're pleased to have a developer of Andrew's stature join the Lab and that we can dedicate our resources to helping him continue his contributions to the Samba project."

Tridgell is currently working on the next major release of Samba, version 4, that has five goals: protocol completeness, extreme testability, non-POSIX backends, fully asynchronous internals and flexible process models.

"Samba4 is reaching an important milestone as a complete re-write of the old Samba code with the ambitious goal to be able to become an Active Directory Domain Controller," Tridgell said. "I'm excited about my new role with OSDL and being free to dedicate my energies full-time to Samba."

Tridgell comes to OSDL after working in research and engineering roles at IBM, VA Software, Linuxcare, Quantum, and is a visiting fellow at Australian National University. About Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)

OSDL -- home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux -- is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux. Founded in 2000 by CA, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel and NEC, OSDL is a non-profit organization at the center of Linux supported by a global consortium of more than 60 of the world's largest Linux customers and IT industry leaders. OSDL sponsors industry-wide initiatives around Linux in telecommunications, in the enterprise data center and on corporate desktops. The Lab also provides Linux expertise and computing and test facilities in the United States and Japan available to developers around the world. Visit OSDL on the Web at http://www.osdl.org/ . NOTE: OSDL is a trademark of Open Source Development Labs, Inc. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Third party marks and brands are the property of their respective holders.