Jeremy Allison

Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol, released under the GNU General Public License. Other contributions include the early versions of the pwdump password cracking utility [1].

Biography

Jeremy Allison, born 1962 in Sheffield (United Kingdom), received a BSc in Physics and Astronomy from Sheffield University. He never finished his PhD (on the noble gas contents of diamond), leaving to join a small software house, Kuma computing, where he developed KBase, a GEM application for Atari ST. He later joined Sun Microsystems to work on gcc. At age 29, he emigrated to the USA in San Jose, working among others on OLIT, XView and the X/NeWS server.

He then joined Vantive as employee #46 and became network architect. He started working on Samba while porting Vantive software to Windows NT. He started exchanging e-mail on Samba with its creator, Andrew Tridgell, around december of 1993 [2]. His early contributions include: reverse engineering the implementation of long file names based on the OS/2 networking implementation, discovering the required "magic number" to implement encrypted passwords, and implementing opportunistic locks. He left Vantive for Cygnus Solutions under Michael Tiemann, porting their then proprietary Kerberos implementation to Windows NT, before working on Cygwin. He then joined Whistle communications (now an IBM company) to work on the Interjet. He later joined Silicon Graphics to work full-time on Samba with Herb Lewis. He then was hired by VA Linux, the first place where he worked directly with many other Samba team members, including Andrew Tridgell, Jerry Carter, Martin Poole, Tim Potter, but also with notable members of the open-source community such as Chris DiBona and Larry Augustin.

When VA Linux laid off their hardware division in 2001 [3], he joined Hewlett-Packard along with most of the Samba team (with the notable exception of Andrew Tridgell), participating with his team in the development of HP's Print Server Appliance [4]. Jeremy Allison left HP for Novell in april 2005, citing Novell as a better place to move people to Linux [5] [6]. In December 2006, Allison resigned from Novell in protest of the patent deal with Microsoft [7]. He is presently a Linux evangelist at Google[8] [9].

Jeremy Allison became a US citizen in 2004. He married Monica Lin, a naturalized US citizen from Wuhu (China) in 2005, and they have a son.

Free Software Evangelism

During his career, Jeremy Allison consistently defended the free software approach:

• He pitched making Vantive code free software to its founder.
• He persuaded Michael Tiemann to use the GNU General Public License for Cygwin.
• He similarly convinced Tim Wilkinson to put the Kaffe virtual machine for Java under the GPL.
• He was involved in Silicon Graphic's decision to put XFS for Linux under the GPL.

This commitment to free software culminated with his decision to leave Novell in protest of a patent deal that was considered by many as a FUD attack on Linux and other free software, and by Allison as breaking section 7 of the GNU General Public License [10].

See also

• Samba

External Links

• Jeremy Allison's web page
• The Low Point, a View from the Valley, Allison's monthly column in Linux User and Developer
• Why a secret patent deal won't help Linux/Windows Interoperability, detailed interview with Allison about the Novell/Microsoft patent pact and his decision to leave Novell