One of the most significant leaders in the open-source software movement arrived in Hong Kong last week.
Andrew Tridgell is the man who created Samba, the free software that allows the Linux operating system to interact with Microsoft's Windows. Last week he gave two talks to capacity crowds of local Linux supporters.
Mr Tridgell now works for IBM but is still best known for his work on Samba.
The latest version, Samba4, would be the biggest upgrade in Samba's history, he said.
'The biggest changes in Samba4 are to modify the internal structure to make it much more maintainable and flexible, while at the same time allowing it to much more closely emulate the precise semantics of Microsoft file servers,' he said.
Considering how much work is involved in making Samba interact with the various versions of the Windows operating system, the Samba team should have a close relationship with the largest software company in the world. The relationship, however, is complex.
'We have had considerable help from various people at Microsoft on occasion but the relationship has been quite variable. In the early days of Samba they were much more helpful than they have been more recently. I still hope that the relationship will improve in the future but there doesn't seem to be much prospect of that in the immediate future while the 'let the lawyers do the thinking' attitude dominates in Redmond,' he said.