Last Thursday, Christine and I attended a presentation at BYU given by John H. Terpstra — one of the core members of the Samba open source software development team.

Mr. Terpstra’s presentation was basically about businesses using Samba to cut IT costs. But, beyond this, he talked specifically about his forthcoming new book — Samba-3 By Example: Practical Exercises to Successful Deployment, why software like Samba and Apache are becoming more like commodity products, Linux on the desktop, and the opportunity for entrepreneurial open-source advocates to form companies to provide outsourced IT services for businesses.

The (created with OpenOffice) slides are available at <http://samba.org/~jht/Presentations/FLOSS-UUGBUY-20040219.pdf>.

John also had two draft copies of his new book with him and he was going to give them away at the end of his presentation. He gave one away to an active Samba administrator at BYU. He asked who else the audience thought should get a book and Christine raised her hand as high as she could. John picked on her and she said, “I think you should give to my husband because he’s started a company to provide the services you described.”

So, I’ve got Mr. Terpstra’s book here. I’m looking forward to putting it to work.