History

The COVID-19 virus family is full of surprises, all of them bad. This note briefly summarises one of the most surprising features, and my hypothesis concerning this feature. Here are the three basic facts: We breathe out more CO2 than we breathe in, and so the more exhaled breath there is in a room, the more CO2 there will be. During COVID-19 this became a practical way to find rooms where ventilation was failing and airborne infection risk was rising. A 2024 Nature Communications paper ↗ found that in laboratory aerosols, moderately elevated CO2 also helped SARS-CoV-2 remain infectious. In other words, the virus prefers stale air - a big warning for us all to get outside and/or inhabit well-ventilated buildings. ...

The image below shows a home page served by a Palm Pilot ↗, once a popular handheld device. The Inetd linux.conf.au LiveCD immersed conference attendees in the talks by letting them run the speakers’ software. We gave all attendees at the 2004 linux.conf.au in Adelaide a bootable CD containing a heterogeneous network of virtual computers running different operating systems, pre-configured with the speakers’ software. I built the Inetd linux.conf.au LiveCD ↗ by modifying Knoppix ↗. Screenshots were in my Tunnelling Hardware over SMTP ↗, selected for a re-run as one of the “Best Of” papers. ...

The problem: Most computer users manually save versions of files with names like Presentation-2027-Jan-11, followed later by Presentation-2027-Jan-11-UPDATED and Presentation-2027-For-Sally-Only, perhaps with Presentation-panic-edits-before-event. This is manual versioning, and even people who stick strictly to a naming convention still get confused at times. Some applications append .bak or prefix ~ to create their own backups, and then occasionally an automatically-created TMP or $tmp$ file can really save the day, and so on. Then when it comes time to clean up and organise a filesystem, everyone hesitates. Am I really sure there is not useful work in each of those ten versions? Which ones do I need to keep? So, we usually keep them all. After all, storage is cheap. ...

In responding to a recent security problem I had to consider the idea of intent in computer software, so I looked to see what Margaret Hamilton ↗ has to say. Hamilton proved her ideas spectacularly during the first Apollo moon landing in 1969. A hardware failure generated unexpected errors ↗, but the software coped by running the highest-priority tasks despite the barrage of errors, preventing an abort seconds before landing on the surface. The abort procedure was dangerous, so she may have prevented tragedy in multiple ways. ...

When Linux was a Struggling Challenger 💡 Key Point This is a 2026 restoration of my (Dan Shearer’s) 1998-2001 guide, preserved at archive.org ↗. Links have been updated to point to the archives where possible. In 1999 I joined my first startup, Linuxcare in San Francisco. The Linuxcare story is a quintessential United States dot-com bubble narrative, featuring a famous venture capital fund, massive growth, a failed IPO, and a fancy new ex-IBM CEO resigning under a cloud. Founded in 1998, Linuxcare aimed to be the “0800 number for Linux”. So close! ...

I participated in many battles directly against Microsoft in the Ballmer era, 1998-2014. Every Samba feature release seemed to further anger Microsoft. Copyright and then especially patents were weaponised, and highly-skilled technical marketing teams spread confusion and intimidated their own (Microsoft’s!) customers if they considered adding Samba compatibility to their IT. In the Nadella era from 2014 to now, Microsoft and other tech giants are using even more brutal ways including paracopyright, technical protection measures and the Unitary Patent System to coerce governments and their citizens. ...

In 2014, Microsoft got a new CEO and dramatically changed course from explicit hostility to embracing open source. The battleground is now [about paracopyright and preventing non-US cloud](/articles/software-patents-tpm-paracopyright) but it has its roots in the great open source IP battles of the 21st century. This timeline covers the period when Microsoft decided free software and Samba in particular was an existential threat. Microsoft often buried competitors in expensive litigation, but turned out to be much more difficult to bury open source like Samba. This was the Ballmer era, named after the then-CEO, and the history of Samba’s triumphs feels highly relevant to 2026 where other giant companies seek to prevent the rise of open source competitors. ...

Adversarial interoperability… Here is the history of our project Samba as it stood in the Adversarial Interoperability ↗ days, recorded in the file history.txt from the Samba source code tree ↗. In the 1990s Microsoft was one of the earliest tech monopolies, and when working in IT at the University of South Australia I saw first-hand the harm being done. I was quite passionate in 1993, according to my co-founder’s statement below. Later, in the dot-com boom days I wrote the first Windows replacement paper. Recently I made a timeline of battles lost and won. ...