[teleforce]

Fun facts, the author of rsync, Andrew Tridgell, is also the one who reverse-engineered Microsoft SMB that laid the foundation for Samba [1].

How he did manage to avoid lawsuits from Microsoft is beyond me.

[1] Server Message Block:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block

[js2]

He also wrote a free BitKeeper client, antagonizing Larry McVoy, which is largely why we have git.

https://blog.brachiosoft.com/en/posts/git/

[tekkk]

Now that was an awesome blog post, thank you for linking!

[amiga386]

He describes how he did it with a French Café analogy:

https://download.samba.org/pub/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt

[webdevver]

>How he did manage to avoid lawsuits from Microsoft is beyond me.

MS probably chose not to shut down that effort on the basis that it was enabling the MS stack in Linux.

I wish I could dig up an internal presentation that was prepared in the 90s for Bill Gates at the time, which evaluated the threat posed by Linux to Microsoft. I think they were probably happy that Linux now had a reason to talk to Windows machines.

[amiga386]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents -> https://www.gnu.org/software/fsfe/projects/ms-vs-eu/hallowee...

[webdevver]

thats the one, thankyou for posting!

[YesThatTom2]

At first, MS didn’t mind as long as SAMBA only implemented the outdated older protocols.

Then they realized interoperability could make them more money, and they invited him and his team to Redmond for a week of working with MS engineers to understand the latest protocol versions. Oh wait, no, it was because the EU forced them. https://www.theregister.com/2007/12/21/samba_microsoft_agree...

[oska]

Australians might like to know he worked on rsync and Samba while a PhD student at the ANU

[kvemkon]

A protocol is not a software, it is needed for interoperability.

Similar with header files. Issues arise if there is a "misuse" to derive actually not a compatible but competing solution.