Open Source

In 2026, the Samba Project ↗ is over thirty years old and has conservatively a billion users. Samba started when I got upset at Microsoft for trying to monopolise all computer networking at the University of South Australia in 1993. I discovered some unmaintained but interesting open source software for sharing files and printers with workstation computers. And the rest is the official Samba history. Samba is implemented by talented software engineers with a very large number of total contributors. I was (and remain) most interested in interoperability architecture and design, why these things are needed and make sense to users. Plus some protocol analysis, for example, technical readers may know the NTLMv2 encryption scheme was tricky, but turned out to be the same as used in the NTFS filesystem - NTLM is deprecated in favour of Kerberos now ↗ but those were the days. I wrote How to Replace Windows NT with Linux, explaining protocol-first strategies for removing Microsoft software. ...

How to manage BibLaTeX across time and cultures I wrote a paper in English using LaTeX ↗ on the topic of Epidemiology and One Health. Some essential references did not exist in English. That might sound simple — just list the originals, plus some translation/cross-referencing work to get the necessary information! It isn’t that simple. This howto is for LaTeX authors with references which are less common in computing/mathematics but otherwise unremarkable, particularly: non-latin scripts, latinisations, non-English references, rare scripts and ancient documents. My sources had all of these at once, giving me the following situation: ...

(written in 2008) How a young Australian discovered Open Source and a career, eventually learning that a mixture of code, law and mathematics is a frontier for human rights battles. It isn’t often I come face to face with myself after a twenty-something year break, but I did yesterday. As a first year university student at the South Australian Institute of Technology ↗ in Adelaide I did landscape gardening oddjobs for companies. I noticed a company called Australian Launch Vehicles (ALV), which sounded very cool, so in I went. ALV was founded by a pair of entrepreneurial rocket scientists. Despite decades of rocketry history in South Australia ↗, there was no local space industry. (Establishing Australian spaceflight in 1987 was ambitious; they failed but others are giving it a go.) ...

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. ...