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?"

Comments

Re:Very likely, but...

[jmauro]

I doubt they care about anyone else's problems with intergration. Anything that can force people to use NT. They're solely in it for the money, not for more altruistic reasons. If your running Netware they'll probably not help, just send you a bunch of brocshures on the total cost of ownership and some such non-sense. They won't ignore, just keep telling you the perfectly good Netware or Unix server is broken. They're not going to be happy until everyone is dependant on their OS, and then they can raise the prices at will. It's really like crack. The first few are free, and then you can afford the 3rd and 4th, but by the 5th time its so expensive you've got to turn to stealing. When you think Microsoft, think crack dealer.

They can take my SAMBA

[Hilary Rosen]

when they pry it from my /etc/init.d/cold/dead/fingers

Really, what can they do? ECMA rules say they have to licence is "non prejudiciously", and usually that means a percentage of revenues, not a flat fee. So if Jeremy Allison has to send them 20% of whatever he charges for SAMBA, they'll have to accept that.

Pure Speculation

[CommanderTaco]

The WHOLE article is based on this one little snippet of "information":

He [Allison] said as they discussed the Server Message Block's password changing scheme, the Microsoft representative, whom he declined to identify, commented: "You know, we have a patent on this, don't you?"

That's it. No hard info on whether microsoft is planning to enforce this patent, or if it's not something that can be worked around. Note that all the people quoted just spout vague generalities like "well, microsoft could screw us over thusly if they wanted to..."

Considering that to really wipe out samba, microsoft would have to destroy interoperability with previous windows versions... I think this article is just more zdnet sensationalist journalism.

This begs the question

[cluge]

Should the open source community be trying to copy the ".NET inititative" or should they try to come up with something different? Let that question sink in a bit and get back to me when you have intelligent commentary.

I would be very surprised to see this happen.

[davidu]

I would be /very/ surprised to see Microsoft implement a new feature into CIFS which when reverse-engineered by SAMBA (legal under DMCA for interoperability issues) would require them to pay a patent license.

The reason this would be hard to stomach is that Microsoft has major customers including banks and other data farms which use Samba across their worldwide networks. Microsoft might be a major behometh and may attempt to stifle Project Mono but I doubt it would be throught the form of changing CIFS (the new version of SMB for those who don't know).

Microsoft is a bully and we will always have things to overcome however they still answer to some people, namely their major customers and when they bark orders, Microsoft listens.

Plus, the story doesn't really even talk about Microsoft changing CIFS, it talks about possible patents in .NET which is entirely possible. We must remember though that the whole world is not kept under US law (though more and more of it has our laws thanks to our friends at WIPO...) Either way, Samba has a pretty stable future despite the minor roadblocks Microsoft throws up.

-davidu

turn it around then...

[snake_dad]

and port Samba to windows. :)