Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer known for his contributions to the

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of

SMB/CIFS Server Message Block (SMB) is a communication protocol originally developed in 1983 by Barry A. Feigenbaum at IBM and intended to provide shared access to files and printers across nodes on a network of systems running IBM's OS/2. It also provides ...

networking

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technolog ...

, released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. Other contributions include the early versions of the

pwdump pwdump is the name of various Windows programs that outputs the LM and NTLM password hashes of local user accounts from the Security Account Manager The Security Account Manager (SAM) is a database file in Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, ...

password cracking utility.

Career

Free software evangelism

During his career, Jeremy Allison has consistently defended the

approach: * He pitched making

Vantive Vantive Corporation was a company that provided customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. It existed as an independent corporation until its merger with PeopleSoft in 1999. Later PeopleSoft itself was acquired by Oracle Corporation. Vant ...

code free software to its founder. * He persuaded

Michael Tiemann Michael Tiemann is an American software developer and executive, serving as vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. Biography He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore Scho ...

to use the

for Cygwin. * He similarly convinced Tim Wilkinson to put the

Kaffe Kaffe is a discontinued "clean room design" ( reverse engineering) version of a Java Virtual Machine. It comes with a subset of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), Java API, and tools needed to provide a Java runtime environment. Like ...

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

for

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

under the GPL. * He was involved in Silicon Graphics' decision to put

XFS XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as ...

for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

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

, and by Allison as breaking section 7 of the

References

External links

Jeremy Allison's web page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Allison, Jeremy 1962 births Living people British computer programmers Google employees