Meet the Industry Leaders: Featuring Jeremy Allison, Distinguished Engineer

one is how did you get started in Samba like why um so this was really interesting I I was working for a startup company called ventif and I was the chief porting engineer I was moving it was a customer support product one of the early three-tier client server systems and I was putting that code to Windows which was very popular at the time it was the early 90s and remember Windows NT was going to completely replay a few minutes and take over the world so yeah I'm so glad it did not oh my gosh me too actually but anyway I was diligently porting the code

over and I realized that I just was ftping source code back and forth all the time and I thought there has to be a better way than this so I'm looking uh on I think it was a Usenet at the time this was a kind of pre-wide Internet levels uh and I found um there was a fan server protocol that Windows spoke and it was called SMB for Server message block and so I thought well how hard can this be to implement so I started coding up and then I don't remember exactly it was one of the usernet news groups I found a guy called

Andrew trigel in Australia had published exactly what I was doing he published a working version so I threw my code away and I looked at his school and I thought oh it's got bugs so I sent him a patch via email and within five minutes a new version had come out with my patch included wow it's like yeah um yes so so this was the instant feedback gratification and then another chap in Germany sent patch number two and the funny thing is both of us are still working on Samba the people who sent the first two patches no way and yeah and so I I

started working on it and I I sold it to my manager as well this is going to make my porting work much easier and by the time I left advantage of it was probably consuming about 40 of my work hours so that could actually be considered one of the very first paid open source positions I'm guessing I kind of love actually yeah yes and then I joined um because I was having so much fun doing that I actually went and joined the first open source company uh that was selling support um for open source software and this was called Cigna Software founded by Mike tiemann

um David gold Wallace and oh God I forgot the name he founded the eff so it was their company and I went and joined that and to my horror it turned out I was the first engineer assigned on their first closed Sports project s which they never shared yet yeah yes so that taught me a lesson but yeah that was that was great and uh and then eventually I started getting paid to work on some right now it was hint really so it's a lot of fun it it's still a really interesting project because it is grown and developed and there's so much in there

uh it now has so many components it's it's not quite as large as the limits Colonel but it's getting up there in terms of lines of code and we have many many more people working on it now so very cool that seems like everywhere you turn it's it's everywhere now now people tend to use it uh as a cloud Gateway there are many companies that use it so that you can attach you can basically use the cloud um via attaching December and it back ends onto someone's big cloud file system somewhere and there are quite a few companies selling that and it's great I mean

I've been I've been working with it and helping people use it for them ever since it was created so when you're doing the porting from Windows and you mentioned NT was that on version three five was that the first one because four came out like late it's so awful yeah yeah it was uh yeah and I actually had to do a port for the uh to the Alpha version the tech Alpha version of uh windows and clean I actually went up to Microsoft and helped put things over yeah oh wow yeah yeah so it was uh yeah it was very very useful uh it was

it was kind of like the universal glue that allowed Linux machines to go into corporate environments in fact for a while um Red Hat used to advertise on the the red hat box that say includes Samba version 1.8 whatever I used to have a list of the open source projects they included on the side of the box I know it's yeah that's very cool yeah cool I had to rebuild way too many nt4 machines yeah good old days good old days yes like a question that's just popped into my mind Jeremy's sorry to go sideways um as I do but you know being a known

contributor to a you know widely used open source project do you get people that reach out to you and want to hire you like for specific projects or thoughts or your ideas or like hey like you know come in and check out what we've done and fix it for us they they mostly want me for Samba and SMB work and so yeah I have had a bunch of people asking will will you come to help fix our SMB implementation a lot of those are actually closed source implementations and uh yeah I help out I help them I help them work uh with this stuff um

all of our code is open or we have an entire comprehensive test Suite all that's open but to be honest I don't I actually work really closely with with an apple engineer because Apple's main fossil in protocol on Max is SMB so he and I will sit together uh once a year in a in a plug Fest room which is a an interoperability test environment and you know I will I will be packing on time because he will be hacking on the Mac code or he'll say oh I crashed you and I'm like oh well that shouldn't happen um oh you crashed my client and

so he left a bit then we we worked together a very iteratively so so this is this is the thing that people don't realize about about programming and this kind of work is people people tend to think oh well this this must be really um glamorous sort of you know um you're creating a wonderful software it really isn't that I I always like to think of myself as as a plumber um I mean the plumbing is not a glamorous job but it's absolutely necessary and everyone ignores the plumbing until the toilets back up right and then they desperately needed a fix and and writing software

is a little bit like that when it works when you when you're doing a great job nobody notices and and you know what nobody should notice because these things you know you're building products for people to use you're building things that people can uh can use to make their lives better and and they can use to to do their real work and if I always I'm lucky in the software is so much fun for me that it doesn't feel like real work so other people use the stuff that we create to do real work and the only time that they notice is when it doesn't

work is when things go wrong um and so the goal is to make fewer things go wrong um and that's the fun part of programming for me um yeah I think we did we have some questions that wanted to pop up Arthur Tye thanks for watching is Microsoft still tinkering with the protocol um do they still occasionally throw sand into the gears or is that all in the past so after Microsoft he still continuously tinkering with the protocol and yes they throw something into the gears but not intentionally this is the funny thing oh Samba and Microsoft were were bitter enemies in the samba project

in Minecraft were absolutely better enemies because they considered um this protocol theirs they didn't want anyone else implementing it there was the entire European union lawsuit about that which I played a large part in but these days after and short answer if anyone anyone forget um anyone anyone forgot the the samba side won the lawsuit Microsoft was forced to open up and document their protocols and one of the things that they found when they did that was they got much more useful so it turned out that there were little silos inside Microsoft and I've worked up there so I know what they're like that never

talk to each other and so somebody would change something and I don't know whether you remember that old Microsoft organizational chart so so there was one with with uh Google which was basically uh everybody cross Matrix talking to everyone else there was one with Oracle which was basically a legal department and a small um software department on the other side and the Microsoft one had all of these different departments and they're all pointing guns at each other and that was kind of like Microsoft in the day and so there were all these different areas in the company that didn't communicate and one of the things

that happened when they were forced to document all the protocols is they realized that they worked a lot better and they actually went with they documented everything they expanded the pie they expanded the industry the sort of um now you can you can take download those documents straight off Microsoft website you can Implement an SMB server you can run the test Suites they're a comprehensive test suite and they found that the protocols are then much more widely used I mean that's why Apple adopted them as their standard Linux has a fantastic implementation that Microsoft actually sponsor and Microsoft has become an open source company I

mean I I can't praise them enough for the change that they underwent between the early 90s and now they have become an open source company yeah sure they still sell lots of closer software they still sell windows or whatever but that DNA has changed and so yeah actually a few weeks ago they released the security update that broke a whole bunch of sample servers and they were so apologetic it was it was a security change that they rushed out without without checking and so they documented it immediately they sent it out we've got to fix ready in about a week or so and pushed it

all out so yeah they they occasionally sort of stand in the gears but now it's it's basically it's because sand is dribbling out of the bag that they're using to fit the tattoo throwing it into the give deliberately so I think it's interesting they say Microsoft Is An Open Source company I don't think many people would view it that way so that's that's good to hear I'm glad that that's the case I'm considering that from I mean remember I sat on the other in the European Supreme Court I was pushed into a suit and and had to testify in front of the the judges or

whatever and Mark is offer on the other side they were not happy so the change from that I have great friends of Microsoft Engineers they're the guy who created the SMB service of the Azure Cloud he gives us ideas for Samba they employ the guy who writes the SME code in the Linux kernel they collaborate with everybody and they are they open up about what they'd like to do with the protocol what their planning how they work with others they don't give us their source code um but at least for that part because that's the windows part but everything else their their default is now

well how can we open source this a lot of it is the enthusiasm of a new convert because I remember I remember back in the early 2000s it was like it's like the Underpants announced you know Step One open source step two something step three profit yes and and yeah open source open source is the software development methodology it's not a business model and there have been many companies that have gone belly up because they confuse open source with the business model um and my my opinion on open source is that it's um and I've heard lioness actually express the same thoughts is that it

is the scientific method of applied the the development of software so you open up your code you let others look at it you let others peer review it you let others point out where you've made errors and everybody's code gets better I remember when I I worked at one of the small companies who actually on that name um and all of this was closed source and I saw some horrible security bugs and I wanted to fix them and they said no no time for that you got to work on the next release I'm like but but anyone could break into this doesn't matter it doesn't

matter customers don't know what the customers don't know won't hurt them oh but it will time yeah and so that that's kind of the closed Source mindset it's like well worshiping a product and if we can fix things later that's fine um and what really made me give up are on that Valentine model was I was working for a company that was using Sun's remote procedure called libraries complex term but basically you may pause and get responses and one of our perennial problems was that it was slow over the early internet so I put a compression layer at the lowest level so that according to

the you know the client and the server would talk to each other and they didn't know that I was compressing the data on the wire in between them it you know it improved it was a little slower in terms of CPU usage on both sides but it actually massively decreased the amount of data traffic so it improved the product and I presented this and they said that's great well done here's a bonus we're gonna put that in the next release because we don't need it right now we're selling more that code never got used wow they just never they it was never the right time

to put it in and when I left it was still in the queue for oh we should merge that sometime so so that was my lesson and I never wanted to work on closed Source software again um yeah yeah so because I had fun with that code I actually remember working on it my mom was in hospital and I went back to England and I was working on the go by a hospital bed while she was you know oh wow yeah well you know if you've been in hospitals you know they can be very boring so you take a lot there's not a lot to

do yeah uh and you know and it just never got used and that was such such a disappointment to me um that yeah I I didn't want to work on closed Source software after that really and I never have which is nice it's fantastic so Jeremy I'm going to ask you to do like a little self-reflection real quick and how would you describe your personality um interesting uh so I am obsessively detailed which I think is the strength for doing software not in anything else as my wife will tell me as well but but in terms of concentrating on coding um uh it can consume

me to the exclusion of other things so I can be very very focused on something and I can't let go of things which you know I was up till 2am the other night working on a boat because I just could not go to sleep and let it go so I I have that detailed um oriented mindset but I also really like working with other people and and so a common myth about programming or engineering is that oh that's for introverts they don't like talking to people and and it's true there are many people like that um one of my Microsoft friends has an old joke

is it how can you tell an extrovert engineer is that he's looking at someone else's shoes rather than his own you know it's about engineers but to be honest especially when you're working in open source the more you can work with people and collaborate with people the more successful you're going to be so you know the line is in his bedroom or I say that being in my guest bedroom right now because I'm working from home which is great by the way um producing something marvelous putting it out of the world and then saying look at what I have done it's just not the way

that that large software is created anymore um I mean you can start it off like that that's great but once it's out there and this is a great thing about open source is anybody can look take that code look at it send suggestions fixes comments security Halls and you know in the age of the internet you have no idea who these people are you have no idea where they're from you know nothing about them other than the fact that you just they just found a bug in your code right and you know there are some people who never get past there I don't like them

they find bugs in my code but you know what what I realized I had to come to a philosophy and in fact many people who haven't got open source are really frying them opening it up because they're like they're fine they'll find floors they'll find mistakes I've made and it's like yes that's the point and it will make you better everybody writes terrible code I write terrible code I mean you know I've had students from China India or whatever say oh look you've got a bug there and I'm sure they feel great about it and [Laughter] the right response to that is thank you I'm

an idiot thank you for pointing that out you know I've learned something today anyone can teach you something about writing better code and uh it's like science you open things up you show people what you're doing yes they're gonna find flaws and that makes your code and what you're doing better it really does it's um this this goes back to one of the earliest things I learned um I used to hang out um with a bunch of people at University it were much smarter than I was one in particular a guy called Malcolm McMahon and I used to hang out with him and these guys

and they would be talking about computer science and I was a mere physics and astronomy student and I used to hang out with those guys and listen to them and I understood maybe one word in ten and I you know I I used to sort of play oh yeah yeah and I play along and we won the game and I suddenly realized I'm not learning anything you know these guys are great guys that hang out with but about things that I simply don't understand and I I remember the first time I felt really humiliated and I said I stopped them and I said excuse me

yeah I don't know what that means will you tell me and rather than laughing at me which is what I thought they were going to do well Malcolm especially he basically went oh sure and he just explained it to me and that's fantastic beginning of wisdom for me is like oh if you actually admit what you don't know people are happy to share and teach yeah I kind of never looked back from that the other person I ran into was Andrew trigel he was the founder of Sandra Andrew is a very very rare Talent he's now writing code to run very high-end drones um he

does Australian Outback based in Australia does Australian Outback search and rescue with his his donker Andrew 's the smartest person I ever met um if anyone uses the rsync algorithm which is very very commonly used it's a common unit Linux command it's it's used in many places to reduce bandwidth and network transfer he invented that he he just came up with it he was the smart he is the smartest person I've ever met and working with him can you imagine that you're a human being in a world of small dogs and they're over eager and Keen to help you know but you have to explain

them like wait wait are you saying that I'm a human being in a world of small dogs because I'm not this Vision no myself Jeremy we're the small dogs I'm afraid and Andrew is the human being nice and everything and he helps you but you can tell that he's disappointed that you don't understand what he's talking about and I remember him ex when he first came up with the Arsenic algorithm he tried to explain it to me and he's got about two-thirds of the way through it and he said and I'll let you work the rest of it out because that way you'll understand it

better I said oh thanks Andrew and a week later I came back to him I said Andrew I'm too stupid I can't figure this out can you explain the rest please so I mean you know there are some towering talents um and and those are probably the people that are affecting me the most um that towering talents in the industry now and Andrew once had a um an Australian news or paper article in Nevada I'm saying is this the smartest man in Australia and uh better it's law of head headlines was incorrect there because the answer to that was yes no no um yeah so

I learned a great deal from Andrew so yeah sorry Jeremy some of this sounds like the beginnings of what now and I think I've I've remember seeing in the last seven eight years Enterprise is really picking up and doing paired programming do you think this is kind of where it started from [Music] um I don't pair programming Works to socialize introverts obviously um it's it has strengths and weaknesses the strengths are you can if you pair two people who are kind of on the same level it kind of helps them make a they make them a little bit better each of them but if you

pair a strong person with a weaker person then it really helps because the the stronger person will help really raise the game of the the weaker programmer but sometimes the task is so complex that it it really requires one person to dig down deep into it and and create something um so yeah it some of the greatest software has been created just by one person initially and then other people start to understand how to work on it um and it again it's a bit like a bit like science you you have your Newtons and Einsteins or whatever and then everyone else comes along and says

oh yeah and then they develop in Hawkings or whatever and they develop it but some of those things you know you need those initial talents really um so yeah in general purpose that means good um it's hard to do when you're working remotely uh you know but having said that working back back when I started everyone had a private office so you could go into someone's office you could work with them whatever these days uh no one gets a private office and in fact the last environment that was in the Google they turned it basically into a warehouse full of hot desks not a productive

work in your mind I'm really sorry it is interesting being in my spare bedroom is much more productive I was at a previous company a couple companies back and they did away with all offices and all cubes and it was just open floor so there was no even department so you may be sitting next to a developer sitting next to a sales guy which I can't imagine that not being the most annoying thing ever because he's doing so different roles sorry if you go into those environments what you'll find is everybody wearing headphones and the program and it's still loud frantically trying not to look

let's go because that's the only way they can concentrate and get things done huh I don't know sometimes I like to go I mean I'm not a programmer so let's just like keep that on the you know Vision but it I think that there's a type of person that actually focuses better if there's chaos going on around them I mean I remember I taught high school for a little while and I know that that sounds weird but like some of the kids and they would have like like you know an actual like document where it would say like this person needs to not be disturbed

right like they can't be having like people around them talking and then there's other people who are like they can't listen and actually hear what you're saying Rose unless they're like walking back and forth and like fidgeting in the back of the classroom and there was just like a variety there's such a variety of different ways that people learn um and and work and are able to focus so I think that there probably is a variety there but for you specifically Jeremy like how do you get into your zone right I mean like is there like something special that you do do you have like

a meditation practice do you like you know clap and do a thing and go into it you stare at a blank screen like what's your right I mean people people weird so you know like my dad plays poker and he used to rub his like lucky you know rabbit's foot thing you know and like turn around three times or whatever I'm joking so beginning of the programming Zone I usually put solo piano music on solo piano music yeah so so sort of piano music classical or whatever and that's a great background in that start and then I start to work and then after about an

hour or so of that I have to turn the music off it's like okay if that's distracting me now that's a great Zone to get in wow yeah and so you get it's if you've if you've seen the Pixar movie so it's a little bit like that getting into the zone you play piano at the game himself on his own and then and then I turn the music off because you know and and of course that's even the exact moment that my wife or son come in and say Dad what have you oh no and just start over um yeah yeah that that's kind of

how you and and the thing about uh at least the programming I do is a very very detailed work I I tried to describe it um as what you have to do is You're Building Castles in the Air you're designing them and you're connecting together and you know but you have to um be able to imagine large Concepts you have to keep them all in your mind at once uh and and the difference between basically the the merely adequate like myself and people like Trish is the amount is this the the beauty of the castles so you know I I can imagine a medieval castle

you know it's kind of cold and drafty and it hasn't working toilets you've just got a point to the hole in trench can imagine a cathedral uh Gothic medieval Cathedral with all of the the pieces in place or whatever and so yeah that's that's kind of how I I think about the differences really um yeah did we have a question I think something popped up at some point from Greg oh Arthur turn again describe the weirdest or most eccentric participants in any golden penguin bowl no need to name names so I I will have to explain here then please do the only thing we involved

was a question that used to be run by um the Linux Foundation at the uh Linux events and after my boss um Chris Debona stopped doing it he handed the software over to me and I started running the quiz show and so the weirdest and most eccentric participant in any golden penguin Bowl has to be me did you wear something weird yeah yeah every single golden penguin ball I would dress up um so I I would do the the quizzes and some of them are available online I haven't not all that many of them were filmed so we had one year that this was Linux

world's show where we had Microsoft versus the open source Community this was back when Microsoft was just dabbling and thinking about getting into open source and then Microsoft passwords were great because they turned up as Darth Vader and a bunch of Stormtroopers that's fantastic they're literally they they were one side was the other side with the Linux hippies basically um the Linux tip is one by the way um but I always used to dress up in I have dressed up in very very many weird costumes one of my my favorites was I put on a bald wig a blue shirt soaked all my underarms with

water and went on a steep owner that's awesome so yeah um that was that was a fun show to do um I wouldn't am I resurrecting that actually um although I think I want the software that ran it the the whole the whole player running a quiz show people think people think oh the questions have to be hard whatever you know but the what I what I did with because I used to write all the questions and they were a bunch of computing science fiction yeah geek trivia basically it was always the Geeks versus the Nerds um and what I would try and do is

I would write the questions so that there was always someone in the audience who knew the answer right and and they were always going that's so simple why don't they know that okay so so anybody in the audience usually thought that's so simple why why are they so dumb so everyone in the audience felt Superior to everybody on stage and that was the vibe I was going for he's the I wanted everyone on the other thing I should be up there those guys know nothing the last question so we would have these two rounds and but the last question could Trump everything and it was

usually something practical like I had okay um here's a here's a bunch of drones pilot these drones from one end to the other and you have to carry something in the middle and put it in the basket on the other side of the room and of course they were these terribly cheap drones from fries that you could barely control it's so fun though everyone had a chance to win or or build a Lego Bridge the longest Lego bridge that you can out of these big Duplo Lego blocks that you know for the Toddlers and and you could watch them kind of designer a bridge that

would be bigger than my competitors so yeah that was that was a fun show to do um a series of your life and experiences and so yes our art just came up with a yeah so what year was the moon blasted out of the Earth's orbit in space 1999. uh I think that's a bit of a giveaway art [Music] thank you I I actually have that series on my Samba server at home um but I haven't watched it for a long time so I'm gonna go with 19.99 but yeah that's that's the kind of question that you would that you would do that's fantastic so

Lennox used to be really much more of a fun especially before the.com crash it was kind of a really fun wild environment these days Linux runs the world your television your monitors the monitors that all of you are looking at even if they're Standalone I guarantee you inside that monitor is a Linux kernel running the screen right um you know your Tesla car is a Linux kernel running running the car um almost all electric smart electronics are Linux space these days so it's kind of a lot less a lot more business but those early days man they they were they were pretty wild there were

some pretty wild parties um before the money ran out yeah but look at what it led to look at now it is in every car it's on every monitor it's amazing it's amazing yeah I mean that's but that's that's the power of science applied to Software the software it creates is simply better I mean that's you know going going back to the coding side of things that when you apply that philosophy you know everybody gets to contribute and that's that's one of the things so when I when I grew up there was no internet um I I taught myself basically I'm going to the library

and reading whatever technical books I could find and then hanging out at the local Bookshop in my hometown and and you know the reason I got to the US was I literally bought a book on a very obscure software technology read it understood it and when it turned out that some needed that some Microsystems needed someone who knew that I was one of the few people they could hire to do that and that's basically how I came to the US um so what was the point I don't know but I just need to say out loud that I grew up with no internet too yep

so you're not that gray or maybe I am that great I was I was gonna say like that could go the other way too but now now the um all of the social I joined some Microsystems back then because I wanted to see unit source code and that was the only way I was ever going to see it yeah now the source code that runs the world is available to everybody yes now you know so whether you're interested in that or not that's you know that's fine if it's if looking at source code isn't your thing but if you are interested that whole world is

now wide open in a way that it wasn't when I grew up yeah and that is that is a wonderful change I think we have a question yeah we do thank you Danica for uh writing in so came across a very recent article what's the eu's problem with open source your perspectives on this regulatory uncertainty affecting OSS so I believe that dinkar is referring to a recent European Union change although I I've been peripherally following it but I haven't been digging into I haven't actually read the the proposed law I believe it's to do with liabilities um and so I think what they're trying to

do is they're trying to uh the most open source software doesn't come with any warranty because it's it's created by people you don't know where they're from you don't know so it's hard to say oh we want that this will um this will actually uh perform it in a certain way and obviously it's software so important now a lot of governments are saying well you know there needs to be some regulatory rules around there so we want to have warranty the problem is if you apply warranty requirements to open source you kind of kill the goose uh that leaves the government because we probably never

would have written Samba if we had been liable for losing people's data because in the early days we lock people's data all the time it's like you know people who run file systems you know what they say they say well you know it's only 10 years old so don't trust it yet it eats your data regularly file systems are very complex they have lots of Fairly cases if you put in laws that say oh no all software must come with warranty you can sue people who created if they don't get it right no one but corporations who can who can give those laundries who can

fund who are Deep Pockets who can defend against lawsuits they're going to write software so the problem with um at least the EU and probably the us too is most of the government um people are not scientists they're lawyers and so they don't necessarily understand how this stuff is done um I mean they don't understand the details they understand the law around it far better than I ever would of course but because they don't actually do the the work of creating the software themselves they can create Frameworks around this like software patterns for instance which are an Abomination um patterns should never have been applied

to software uh copyright is is natural fit for software protection so once they start messing with things um it's like you wouldn't you wouldn't want software Engineers to write laws well it says this and so that's what it must mean there's a lot of just not like so so you don't necessarily want lawyers writing the rules of the software that's probably the best way I can put it so hopefully these things will shake out in the wash because if the EU does dumb things then probably they will a lot of businesses will not be able to create software there and that would be very bad

for them uh and it's the law of unintended consequences of course so hopefully that answers your question um so if you want to have to follow please feel free oh thank you for thank you for the question thank you for asking so I have another question for you if we don't mind throwing up the picture feel free it's waiting maybe there you go familiar oh my gosh oh buddy I hope he's not offended so I do have another actual question so you've seen a lot you've been through a lot uh what is one of the most important lessons you've learned throughout your career and or

through the uh just being involved in open source um so um important lessons egoless programming every everybody can contribute this is not an exclusive um uh career this is non-exclusive task everybody who is interested welcome everybody who is interested everybody who wants to contribute everybody can help if the if they want to uh if they're willing to take the time you know if you don't want to write code you can help other people use the software if you don't want to do that you can write documentation um it's a collaborative effort and people working together is what makes open source so powerful um and it's

the it's it's literally the power of collaboration and yeah there's lots of argument about licenses and what's the right piece of software to do this or that but the whole point is with the code open and being developed in the open everybody gets to participate um and and that's that's really the most powerful message I think that's that's the transformation that came about in the 90s and early 2000s from you know when I grew up when computers with these mystical things that you know you never they were just they were literally black boxers I like to say that computer used to be black boxers that

rattle when you pick them up because something was broken inside but you didn't know what it was well now you get to see the in the internals um the other thing at the other point I wanted to make is um in terms of openness of source code the programmers have what open source is clearly a better way of developing software everybody gets to see it now we need to help everybody else because the things that I wanted when I grew up because I want to see unique source code I want to know how things done how they would I have all one now anyone who

wants to can have all that now the thing that I I'm concerned about is something called DRM digital Rights Management and that is when you can see the source code but you can't really use it devices are locked down and unfortunately the best example of that are the phones like the iPhone uh now that's close to all software but it's even the internals of an iPhone is built on open source software but you don't get to modify it or even on most of the Android phones which again you can see the source code for but if you can't make changes and see how those changes

work then you've lost the freedom so I'm frightened that we're moving towards the world where yes you can see the source code to all of your devices but good luck changing any of it um so you can't so for instance you can't modify the code in your television that you might want to do now this you might say well what does this matter what percentage of people are going to want to modify that code but I think I think that's missing the point it's and and Bob Young um of red hat described it best and he was describing propriety software but it could also be

described be describing digital Rights Management he said would you buy a car with the hood welded shut and you know no is the answer because you want to be able to take it at any local marriage and fix that those rights may be going away because now that cars are computers on Wheels and they're locked up um with digital Rights Management which uses cryptographic techniques which are unbreakable usually or they're tempted to be Unbreakable then essentially they've welded the hood shut with software not with physical Hardware so again you're going to the point where if you have a problem with your car you have to

go to the dealer yeah because they're the only ones with the software that can even diagnose what might be going wrong and so this ties into a really important movement called the right to repair if you're familiar with but but if you're not it would be a great thing to look at so the right to repair movement basically says stop building products that are disposable and throw away build products that people can actually repair or take to local repair shops I mean it's environmentally better it's it's using resources less Etc but it goes against the philosophy of well we can we can sell you a

phone and after it breaks in two years always obsolete we just sell you another one and you throw the other own way right it's massive amount of waste so so that those that's the important Trend that I I see that kind of concerns me so you know in terms of source code access I have all I want um but actually being able to use it that's that's the bigger battle and that's that's something that affects everybody not just programmers yeah it was big in agriculture too there's a lot of farm equipment that was becoming unrepairable by the end user exactly oh we have a great

question coming in um Igor hey thanks for joining so how do you keep the quality of code if anyone can contribute a fantastic question um so the way it works is that anyone can propose a contribution that contribution does not have to be accepted and so a common misconception around open source is that well it's open anyone can put anything in there but that's not true there are Gatekeepers around the code so I'm I'm going to use Samba as an example because that's a project I'm not familiar with obviously so Samba has the actual repository for official Samba is completely controlled locked down and the

people who have access to it have cryptographic keys so anyone anyone can take that repository they can create a copy of it they can put their own changes in whatever they want and they can push you out and say this is my version of Samurai we can't stop that we don't want to stop that that's great that's how Innovation is done but for the actual Samba the samba you get from samba.org the code that comes in first it's looked at you can put it you can contribute on the web you can contribute on a mail list there's many different ways that code is looked at

by the existing engineers and for a non-team members contributing something it has to be reviewed line by line by two engineers it also has to have a regression test now a regression test is something that tests the new functionality and software and make sure that it doesn't break some existing functionality so what before you put a piece of code into Samba it has to run a five hour test Suite that tests absolutely everything we can think of testing the main functionality the printing everything gets tested so every time a code contribution comes in it runs through that test suite and if it's adding new functionality

it is required to come with new tests so what that means is the quality of the code we call it test driven development the quality of the code is is theoretically we make mistakes we always make mistakes is very high and so yes anyone can anyone can't contribute they can propose a contribution but getting it accepted is something different and so this is why when you get for instance a uh when you get lucky Linux you download the software from cryptographically signed repositories so you're not just pulling stuff oh yeah I found something great for Rocky on the internet from you know malware is us.com

um great I'm gonna I'm gonna pull that package you you have to decide who you trust but the great thing is you decide who you're going to trust nobody takes that away from you there's no there's no equivalent to the of a company for Rocky saying oh no you could only trust these things you're not allowed to pull software from anyone else you can decide who you trust if you decide malware is isos.com is your trusted vendor then oh from there good luck well that's that's your decision it's true yeah so that's that's how the code quality is maintained I hope that answers your question

please feel free to follow up with if you haven't have any comments on that I think we have another question we do yeah Arthur um this goes right into it actually so has anyone or any company ever tried to insert malware into Samba and how did the organization deal with it or respond to it that is a great question um we create enough bugs on our own oh actually so so to my knowledge no one has ever tried to insert malware into someone um some of the things that have happened around that so Microsoft had a terrible bug that was found and exploited by governments

I'm not gonna mention who but I'm sure you can guess um and the government did not tell Microsoft about that book they were using it to exploit to infiltrate Microsoft systems all around the world as soon as Microsoft knew they fixed it of course but the policy was not to tell them about it now that bug was significant enough that I actually chatted privately I've chatted privately with people who's who looked up what that bug was just to see if there was any possibility of it being inserted and there was not it was simply a mistake Samba has had a similar falling bug that would

allow you to take over any machine in fact um to somebody we found it about two months after the markers of one and somebody posted a very cruel meme saying Microsoft this is the most catastrous security hole in Microsoft's history Samba team hold my beer we had an appalling book and again you know I know the person who did it you know it was so bad you couldn't have designed a better book to compromise your system you just couldn't believe it but it was a genuine mistake software is hard enough that you know a lot of the time they don't have to you don't have

to look for Malin 10 incompetence is is purely enough but the people who who gave my particular ire and we've had this in Samba our companies who sell exploits so they find a bug they don't tell that the developers or the manufacturers or the creators of the software they don't tell them about it and they sell it on the open market those people are if they weren't doing software they would be smashing your car windows and taking your radio well dating myself here taking your streaming server or whatever it is in the cars these days yeah they're they're awful people and we've had that we've

had a company that was selling exploiters and part of that contract was that if you they sold you the exploit you were contractually obliged not to tell the samber team about the Battle when eventually I still just like I said these are awful or high yeah that's a that's a that's a a board person that you know had something very productive way they pay Engineers break into it and sell the Xbox this is an industry yeah crazy yeah it's right we gotta oh thanks for reading it again so what do you think msos is still pervasive or why do you think do you think Ms

will adopt the Linux kernel to be relevant I had this question for a long time um you are one of the best Samba creators to answer this so so interestingly enough I I had a joke with Linus back in the early 2000s I said when do you think windows will be based will be a thin graphical interface stream on top of the lineage kernel oh we estimated in the 2020s to be honest that's not gonna happen um I mean Microsoft is big enough uh competent enough to maintain the windows kernel um for the rest of time but already what you do see is the windows

kernel is usually virtualized on top of Linux kernels so if you look at and I think these are numbers from Marcus themselves over 50 percent of the OS is in the Microsoft Azure cloud or Linux now they may be re-running virtualized Windows kernels on top um but Linux is the dominant operating system within the cloud so the amount of work it would take Microsoft to do what we joked about this was probably before virtualization became really popular um and containerization the amount of work it would take them to report all of the windows user interface to be on top of the Linux kernel is more

work than simply maintaining the existing Windows kernel and virtualizing it on top of the learning space so the the Linux currently is already massively relevant to Microsoft it's already probably their biggest money making operation um and you know the amount of money they spend on maintaining I have no idea on the numbers on this so I'm making it I'm an engineer and I'm nothing about Finance yes that it's cheaper to Simply maintain the Legacy Windows kernel running on top of Linux that it would be to Port the elements that you want on top of Linux and eventually all software will be basically cloud-based or or

you know running in a browser and therefore it really won't matter what the underlying kernel is but it will be Linux yes as well yeah because because that's what everyone is collaborating on and that's you know that's that's why Alchemy is no longer popular if you look back into the Medieval ages there was an Alchemists and there were scientists and sometimes they were the same people and The Alchemist promise like Preparatory software vendors they promise they could turn your lead into gold um who actually figured out how that was possible nuclear transmutation are the scientists and that's kind of the way things are going in

in software there are still proprietary vendors out there who promise to turn your lead into gold but the the real value is in in open source yes I think that's where it's supposed to stay so we're running up on time Jeremy we want to make sure we give everybody back the time but I I do have one more question what piece of advice would you give to someone who's just starting their career out do you want to be involved in open source starting a career probably working in Enterprise maybe writing some proprietary software what would you advise them well there's nothing wrong with writing compassion

software it pays the bills it's you know it it's not something I enjoy there's a lot of there's a lot of required to software like that it's a good way to get started the thing to do is to read and understand other people's code and don't be frightened by looking at some of the most sophisticated code that runs the world and thinking that it must be bug free it's not it's terrible it's all crap all software is bad family internal is about the browser's about everything is bad because this task is really hard and until AI takes over the world and you know treats us

all as pets and right so software for us then human beings are going to make horrible horrible horrible mistakes so read other people's code look for both look for things that you can do better look for ways to change it even if you're just fixing spelling mistakes we just had a great patch come in from someone who was fixing a bunch of spelling inside the samba code because Engineers can't spell that is greatly appreciated because it's improving remember writing code is a process of communicating to another person what your intent is and if it's spelled correctly then if the comments are spelled correctly that's helpful

so read other people's code look for both look for things that might be wrong that's the only way you're going to learn I mean that's why I was so desperate to get into a units company because I wanted to see that code and you know what I got there it was full of books yeah underwhelmed no no I was I was amazingly impressed but I realized I could fix them you know yeah that is very cool the code I could actually hey well no that's not quite rhyme maybe we should do it this way and you know if the environment is an open model and

this is it then you can actually contribute and that's that's how you start if you're just starting off read other people's good in software I mean I have no advice on any of the careers I know nothing about any other career but but yeah read the software learn from it um and there are these days there are so many free books available on the internet you want to learn how the Linux memory subsystem works there's a book on that you want to learn about how the scheduler works there's a book on that you want to learn how how the how to Port things between different

systems that are booked there and these are free books I used to spend so much money on computer books um Jeremy nothing not to cut you off but you're talking about books okay last question and then uh we're out of here but I what's the name of your book does it exist What's it gonna be my my book would be massive mistakes I have made okay um I used to be on the Google hiring um what I would do is my interview questions were not the the standard Google sort of oh cleverly implement this I don't know whatever I would give themselves a piece of

I would give them a piece of code or give them a description of a piece of code that I had personally screwed up and I would say please write this and um you know what would happen is something I mean the the candidates that were great I would say oh that's perfect you you you didn't you didn't do the same book that I did um but it I I would give them I would give them the opportunity to correct mistakes that I have made and so I think that's you know it's great looking at wonderful code and saying oh this is perfect this is great

but what's really um instructional and that's what I like to do a book about is here's bad code why is this bad what did I do wrong how could I do how could I have done it better one of my favorite pictures on the internet is from the Mozilla offices in San Francisco and there's a guy working at a standing desk he's a really tall guy I can't remember his name though it's about six feet tall he's working in the standing desk and then above him sort of like 20 feet up in the air there is a line on the wall and above that line

is written Must Be This Tall to write multi-threaded code oh sorry the people are in the threaded Cody's some of the most complex in interactions um so yeah it what it means is nobody writes good code and learn seeing bad code and understanding why it's bad is really the beginnings of wisdom in a career at least if you're doing programming I think so I love it all right well that was beautiful Jeremy thank you so much we are so blessed to have you at ciq you guys you can reach out to us find them on LinkedIn you ask him any question he told you here

and now you ask him a question he will answer in detail so do that remember I have tasks to do [Laughter] we look forward to your book you are amazing yeah yeah yeah it'll happen just put on some you know nice piano music in the background you know and it will just flow at that point I'll be staring at a blank pay blank screen going what do I do now it's awesome all right you guys well thanks for joining us thanks for being here Jeremy Zane you are always amazing we just adore all of you sorry if we didn't get to everybody's question but you

know keep writing them in eventually we will answer every single one I really appreciate the people ask me questions yeah thank you very much guys it makes it a lot of fun so thanks a lot great to meet everyone virtually bye everybody [Music]