Interview: Talking pizza and packets with Samba co-founder Tridge (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge interviews Andrew Tridgell. "Much in the same way that Cisco founders Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack invented the router so they could send emails to each other across the Stanford University campus, Andrew Tridgell just wanted the three computers on his home network to talk to each other. The three computers, a PC running DOS, a Sun workstation, and a DECstation 3100 running Digital Unix, needed a common protocol that all could understand. Hacking on what he thought was a proprietary protocol of a DOS-Unix program called Pathworks, Tridge (as he's known) accidentally found himself reverse-engineering the heart of Microsoft's networking, the SMB protocol."

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Why I like the Linux Community

Posted May 20, 2003 0:17 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

The whole pizzaware thing started as a joke, but soon took on a life of its own. Many years ago I included the following paragraph in the README for Samba:

You could also send hardware/software/money/jewelry or pizza vouchers directly to Andrew. The pizza vouchers would be especially welcome.

I never expected anyone to actually do it! Soon after that an enterprising person managed to convince pizza hut in Australia to issue some pizza vouchers (which they didn't do at the time). I used the first vouchers to feed the assembled hordes at a Canberra Linux User Group meeting.
After that people found all sorts of ways to send pizza. I received cans of pizza makings, pizza vouchers, a 'pizza account' at a local store, GIFs of pizzas via email and even a nice little origami pizza. I'm not sure how many I received in total, but it was quite a few!
The best lot was when someone rang up from Germany and quoted his credit card number to a local pizza place for $300 of pizza. That's a lot of pizza in Australia, and it took my wife and me many months to get through it. At the time we were both students with an almost zero combined income so it was very welcome!

I suspect that no one ever sent the SCO developers pizza...