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MS getting rid of SAMBA?
BenRussoUSA writes "In this ZDNet story . Brian Behlendorf of Apache, Jeremy Allison of SAMBA, Miguel de Icaza of Ximian and now MONO and Eric Allman of Sendmail are all quoted in a story regarding a nasty rumor. Microsoft may be planning to include a Microsoft patented technology at a crucial interoperability point in .NET and maybe the next version of CIFS. Could this spell the end of SAMBA?"
Alas the US not only give the tone in technology but in legal matters too. For instance EU is seeking to implement a software patent law and a DMCA like law too. Lobbies are pushing this very hard in Bruxelle so this not only a US problem, Japan is doing the same thing, and soon because of WTO everybody else will follow.
This is how harmfull laws are passed without the will of citizens who are eitheir too ignorant to act or too weak to have their voices heard. No wonder you have more and more activism in Worlds Summit like it happened in Genova (Italy).
A quick search on the United States patent database for all patents from 1996 to the present with the word "password" in the abstract and the assignee having the word "microsoft" reveals 11 patents. It appears that this one : 5,719,941 Swift , et al. February 17, 1998 "Method for changing passwords on a remote computer" is indeed the patent in question. The abstract is : Abstract A method for changing an account password stored at a physically remote location is provided. After initiating a password change sequence, a user submits both an old and a new password to its client machine. Thereafter, the client computes two message values to be transmitted to the server. The first message is computed by encrypting at least the new password using a one-way hash of the old password as an encryption key. The second message is computed by encrypting the one-way hash of the old password using a one-way hash of the new clear text password as the encryption key. The server receives both messages and computes a first decrypted value by decrypting the first message using the one-way hash of the old password, previously stored at the server, as the decryption key. The server computes a second decrypted value by decrypting the second message using a one-way hash of the first decrypted value as the decryption key. The server compares the decrypted one-way hashed value, transmitted in encrypted form in the second message, to the pre-stored hashed old password. If the two values are equal, then the server replaces the old password by the new password. (look for yourself at www.uspto.gov if you don't believe me)
AFAIK, you can't patent software in Australia, where Samba is developped. So, even if there were such a (US) patent, it would not stop Samba. Well, there might be a small period where Samba would not work while they are busy catching up (i.e. implementing the new algorithm), but the next version all would be back to normal.
Then you open your organization to patent infringement liabilities. Do you want to be the guy who's name comes up when the CIO asks "Who cost me $X in patent licensing fees from 'free software'?"
So now instead of you being able to thumb your nose at the BSA because you use Open Source, they'll be gunning for your Samba installation.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
CIFS = Common Internet File System, also known as a slightly updated version of SMB, also known as the Windows file-sharing protocol. There is nothing really Common or Internet about it. (Did Microsoft give it this name?)
SAMBA = the SAMBA project, a free implementation of an SMB file server for non-Microsoft systems. SAMBA also includes directory services and other Windows NT Server features, so you could theoretically replace a WinNT box with an old Pentium running Linux.
By adding proprietary and patented encryption into the next version of the SMB protocol, SAMBA will no longer be able to emulate a Windows NT file server. At best, Microsoft clients would warn the user that they are not using a 'secure' connection, scaring management and IT support into buying a new Microsoft server. At worst, it could mean that Windosw XP cannot connect to SAMBA servers at all, forcing people to switch to Microsoft servers.
This is another effort by Microsoft to lock you into using their products. You will no longer be able to choose the type of server you want to run, if you want Windows XP compatibility.
There are two possible hopes:
1) Microsoft doesn't make this encryption a requirement to connect
2) Someone writes a SMB-compliant network driver for Windows XP
That's funny. We get absolutely no support from MS for our older operating systems. We pay a lot of money to them for support too. The business market is the one they most want to force to upgrade.
Here's a link to the full text of the patent. But according to the article, "Microsoft does not have to disclose any patents on .Net technologies, unless it is not willing to license them in a nondiscriminatory fashion." And a "nondiscriminatory fashion" toward Ximian Inc would probably involve a royalty-free license. IOW, Microsoft will probably do its usual routine of "We won't sue you over our patents on this technology if you don't sue us over your patents on this technology" in the white paper, as it has done for the FAT specification.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is this true? Consider this article from Fortune about Rambus, in which they were dinged for not disclosing a patent to a standards committee.
The article mentions that Sun and Dell got in trouble for similar things, and had to license the patents royalty-free. Dell had a patent on VL-BUS technology, and Sun had one on DRAMs for SparcStations that Kingston complained about. The Dell story (from 1996) is summarized here and this is from the FTC, while the Sun case (from this year) is mentioned here and here.
- adam
Here at the office we still have Windows 98, 95, and yes, even windows 3.11 and dos machines on the network. Somehow I doubt MS will write new protocol drivers for all of these OSes and will thus HAVE TO support SMB for compatibility reasons.
(I fully suspect they do have a whole file cabinet full of patents, but I'd like to see them before I start making assumptions about the future of open source.)
Not only do we not know the specifics of the alleged patent, but we don't know if it's trivial or not. There's no guarantee it won't flunk the prior art or novelty tests.
Why don't they realise that they only reason the Internet has been so successfull is because it works by using a set of standard protocols that anyone can adopt and use. The best thing about the Internet is that I can run Linux on all my office machines and still access the Windows based services that others provide. By taking this road MS are in danger of marginalising themselves and not Linux. There simply has to be interoperability between different platforms in the modern business world.
In my company, for example, all of the tech guys use UNIX and all of the admin and sales use Windows. We have to interact with each other. If MS aren't going to allow it through their tools, it just means companies like mine will have to migrate to non-MS solutions for even the Windows machines. I just feel that MS are shooting themselves in the foot by taking this sort of approach.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
We have two. Samba, which is open source even if it is based on SMB, and NFS, which frankly, sucks.
Nothings to stop you from writing an SMB client for WindowsXP that can communicate with a Samba server you know.
Ironic side note:
This, I recall, is exactly what MS did to Spyglass. When Spyglass sued MS for not paying agreed-to royalties on Internet Explorer, MS responded that the royalties on a product that they sold for $0 was $0. One more company screwed by MS.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
*Very* good point. I didn't say they were planning to enforce it. I didn't really want to talk about it much at all, and wish it hadn't ended up at ZDnet or Slashdot to be honest. I tried to get Charlie to remove this section from the article, but it was one of the only pieces of evidence that he had about patents, and in his judgement that made it important enough to mention.
It's not "sensationalist jounalism", though. Charlie is trying to make an important point which I will discuss below.
The reason I spoke about it at all is that my personal feelings are that implementing *NEW* Microsoft-revisioned protocols is a waste of people's time. Once they've become a de-facto standard, like SMB, then we have no choice but to try and implement them, just in the same way that Abiword, StarOffice and KWord have to load Microsoft Word file formats.
But to start implementing new Microsoft designed protocols and *help* them become ubiquitous is insane. All IMHO of course.
I don't think Microsoft is planning to wipe out Samba and it is sheer paranoia to speculate on that point.
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
There is a set of extensions to HTTP designed for precisely this kind of file sharing.
The protocol is called WebDAV.
WebDAV, a set of extensions to HTTP provide the following additional things that are especially useful for file-sharing: locking, versioning, logging, access-control lists, and searching (yes, with different grammars, too), and it runs over HTTPS along with HTTP.
Most people don't realize it, but A TON of products((by such luminaries as Adobe, Macromedia, and Microsoft) support WebDAV (which is an extension of HTTP).
It was mentioned in the Halloween Document as a decommoditizing protocol.
Furthermore, there are plenty of open-source implementations of webDAV on both the client- and server-side including:
mod_dav (an apache module that makes it into a DAV-enabled server)
and
davfs (a module for linux that makes dav folders seem like normal directories) Check it all out! -Michael p.s. By the way, it runs over HTTPS as well as HTTP, so don't get scared. p.p.s. In the interests of full-disclosure, I work for Xythos Software and we make a robust, scalable WebDAV-enabled server.