“Personally, my foray into Open Source software was in 1991, on a software project, but it never quite dawned on me as a movement that way, or that Open Source was the only way to work,” he said, enunciating carefully into his cell while waiting to board a flight. “I could never have achieved what the group managed to do. We did build around a community; we just never thought it as a ‘community. We were just doing something as an interested group."

Terpstra is a business-technology consultant whose career spans two decades of producing software applications, solving networking problems, and advising companies.  He is CEO of a company called  PrimaStasys, Inc., which is in the business of mentoring IT companies. Don't bother to Google; There is no web site for PrimaStasys. Terpstra tells Open he prefers to have it known through word of mouth.  He himself is best known as co-founder of Samba, but he shrugs off  attempts to put him in any hall of fame. He downplays his Samba role as “Only a fellow traveler, who happened to help out a bit in putting some organization behind it, that’s all.” As a fellow traveler, Terpstra definitely gets around.

Terpstra is a seasoned presenter at gatheringssuch as the recent Southern California Linux Expo in November,  speaking on Samba-3 and FLOSS, He's a member of the Open Source Software Institute Advisory Board, and has been active in the Free Standards Group, among other associations.

Despite his reluctance to self-inflate, Terpstra does not hold back from center court to expound on issues he believes in. What he believes in can be described as freedom of choice, as he spreads the word about why business customers gain far less by choosing  costly, dead-end, single-choice propositions, instead of technology built on open standards. "I am not anti-proprietary. I am not antagonistic of proprietary software. I am against those who seek to stamp out competition. I support making sure people have real and viable alternatives, not just left with a choice of one.”

Speaking about his journey into Samba, Terpstra traces that back to a consulting job when the IT head of a company told Terpstra that there was another problem: The executive said he would need to move to a bigger building, because with all the terminals and PCs around, people would need more space to work. “I asked him how much it would be costing the company to move. He said $5m. I said, if I can cut down your desktop requirements and save you that rent, would you be interested? He said, Are you serious?"

Terpstra set about finding a way for terminal emulation and his team solved the customer's problem. That victory drew his interest further and further into data integration and something called Samba. Those who have been following the progress of Open Source constructs over recent years need no introduction. First authored by Australian Andrew Tridgell in the early 1990s, Samba was easily destined to become a very big deal for system administrators in the way that Samba enables a Linux or Unix server to function as a file server for client PCs running Windows. Many industry observers even credit Open Source Samba and Apache for having helped drive business decisions to move to Linux in the first place. 

One might think that with this kind of strength, the stewards behind Samba would by now have formed an impressively complex dual-organization scheme of non-profit foundation and development community. Not in your lifetime—and certainly not in John Terpstra's.

The global Samba team remains a loose-knit group of about 20-people  contributing regularly to Samba with direct write access to the Samba CVS tree. The Samba site hardly dwells on publicizing how many people use Samba. “There are certainly very many thousands of Samba users,” they say, “although it is impossible to tell how many since there is no central sales or distribution organization.” The organization seems to care less about market dominance than quantifying the underlying business needs to migrate to Samba. There is a survey going on that Samba leaders say is designed to help potential users understand why people find Samba useful.

Why not move to form a foundation to deal directly with business organizations in co-development deals? “No,” asserts Terpstra. “We want to be as informal and as casual as we can.” But why? “Because we believe in the freedom to associate and to disassociate at will."

As for the Samba book, it has been well-received as the definitive how-to for Samba-3 in production environments. Its material comes directly from the Samba team and volunteers. We ask yet another why: Why fork over money for a bound book when one can use the Samba site to freely cruise for documentation?

“Happy hunting,” is Terpstra’s grave answer. The sprawling range of Samba documentation makes for difficult navigation, while the book allows system administrators to easily find what they need. What’s more, Terpstra says, it is a truly collaborative development book,

What’s next? Terpstra looks forward to completion of a “second book.” While the November release of Samba-3 is how-to, he says the second opus will be “Samba by example."