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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?"
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.
Doctrine of Equivalents
Obviously, they're going to license McAfee's ASP business model patent. That way, they're not the ones preventing "innovation" - it's McAfee, who won't care one whit about the negative puiblicity, because MS will keep shoveling money at them to maintain an exclusibve license agreement.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Among the unexpected features Mac OS X 10.1 will include: A built-in SMB client. I wonder what effect that had on MS's decision.
They're solely in it for the money, not for more altruistic reasons.
No, they're not in it for the money. They're in it for the power. Microsoft already has more money than God. Remember, gobs of money is just a front-end to power. If you can skip the money part and just go for the power, then why not do that? (Just ask Microsoft, they should know!)
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I think that most people could see something like this coming from a mile away. And I don't think it will be the last thing either.
It makes sense for Microsoft to encourage the use of Microsoft technology and discourage all others. Samba and whatever else be damned in the process.
It sucks.
-- yawn. --
If Microsoft makes NT6 incompatible with Samba, these customers get to choose to stop using NT or stop using Samba. Microsoft is probably safe in betting that they'll stop using Samba -- which means more, not fewer, licenses sold. Microsoft's history is one of gratuitous incompatibilities and product lock-ins. With Media Player, they've added patent intimidation to their arsenal. Using patents to lock Samba out of NT6 networks would be nothing unexpected.
We must remember though that the whole world is not kept under US law
Samba would lose its U.S. developers, its U.S. distribution channels (everyone from RedHat to SGI), and its air of legitimacy among U.S. businesses. The same "major customers" that use large networks with both NT and Samba will be very wary of using any software that violates patents and cannot be written or supported within U.S. borders. Microsoft could make Samba as much of a battleground as DeCSS has been.
Great example, but I wouldn't be able to vote either because my grandmother didn't have the right to vote and she was white. My mother gained the right to vote as she was born in 1915, but my grandmother died two years before women gained the right to vote in 1919.
Yeah, but there are ways around a lack of seteuid and related calls that can be implemented without too much difficulty. It'd be pretty much worthless, though. The lack of real file locking capabilities pretty much ruins the show, though. That's a problem for a lot of things under cygwin. I finally got Eterm to compile and run, for example, but it's almost not worth having.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I think it's possible that the time when MS could "lock up" SMB/CIFS via patents may have passed. Samba is used by too many "mainstream" IT sites to provide Unix/Windows integration - sites that have already spent huge sums of money trying to port their business critical applications to Windows and failed.
If they actually tried to do this, the effect would be akin to the results if they tried to change MSIE to break on Apache servers (to create pressure to switch to IIS). Even before Code Red, very few sites would switch from Apache to IIS. Making the browser break on Apache would break so many sites that it would not force servers to switch to IIS, it would force users to switch from MSIE.
Likewise, if some future version of Windows breaks Samba, IT managers would simply insist on the old versions of Windows until they found a workaround, e.g., third-party SMB drivers for the "improved" Windows on new systems. Or they would investigate whether it's cheaper, and less risky, to convert every single workstation to Linux than to try, again, to port their key application to run on Windows. Combined with the other major headaches MS is trying to force down IT's staff (e.g., some early reports that the "new and improved" licenses sometimes go *poof* without warning, but it can take days to arrange a replacement. If that happens at the wrong moment, a company could lose a contract or a court case, costing millions of dollars. Are you willing to bet your company - and your personal savings - that Windows will never barf on you?) and this could be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back.
If I had to guess what's happening, MS is floating a trial balloon. They won't pay attention to us, but if InfoWorld starts reporting on the rumors and has some Fortune 500 IT managers saying they'll seriously evaluate alternatives if Samba is locked out of a latter-day CIFS, we'll never hear of this idea again.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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).
Someone who knows the .NET protocols will have to figure out if one of these applies. The obvious one "5,719,941 Method for changing passwords on a remote computer" might not happen to be the method used by .NET.
Unless you come to the USA, then they will arrest you. Just look what happened to Dmitry Skylarov.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
I think you guys are missing my point. I am not talking about reverse engineering. Why are we always chasing them? If you provide a BETTER means by which people can share files, people will adopt it. And, noting that open source has some of the brightest minds out there, I dont see developing something like that being a problem. All system calls are documented in the MSDN. That is all you would need to create something of the sort. I am not talking about reverse engineering VFAT, NTFS, whatever. I am talking about sharing files / printers....that is all.
Intelligence is like four wheel drive, having it just means you'll get stuck in more remote places.
I'll give ya every version of Windows, though.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Remember how IBM tried to keep the API between OS/2 and Windows compatible, and MS simply added more incompatibilities to the API? Same game plan here. Microsoft was probably shocked to find SAMBA to be quite a quality product. Why would I pay for NT server license to set-up a file server, if I can just use anything else that runs Samba?
The Samba team should work on their own "variant" of samba and develop drivers to all systems including MS. I mean, instead of reverse-engineering the PDC protocol, develop your own Open Source implementation of it including a client for MS OS's.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
I guess you're an American? In that case, write to your Congressman - this should show everyone what monopoly is all about...
What Patent is it? Well click on this link here to see the 11,000 some odd patents that at least refer to M$ patents or this here to check out the over 1,700 patents assigned to M$. Then, take your best guess, a free beer for anyone who guesses correctly on the first guess!
My guess: This nice little patent on electronic transactions, the key to M$ Passport strategy. After all, we all know that is what they want, which is a piece of everybody's cake. This is what many Fortune 500 financial service (banks, insurance, finance, investement banks) have been worrying that M$ would do for years. Passport is the key, you will be borg.
Or maybe one of these if you just look for transactions in the patent Abstract field.
Anybody have a better idea?
Real men don't need signitures!!!
If this will come to an end its not a great loss, its more an accelerator for the people to head towards a Unix-like desktop instead of a Microsoft desktop.
And if its not Samba then it will be NFS or whatever. After migrating away from a Windows platform nobody will miss the SMB services.
Well, maybe I miss it a bit since Samba is the only reliable server I know. Windows Servers tend to be suddenly "unavailable" if the ammount of data transfered grows... :-)
Usually MS is bending over backwards wrt. enabling you to run old programs etc. Would they really cut all 95/98/NT/ME clients off? .au would let them patent software
When NT started using encrypted password, there was a registry tweak, which enabled Samba to function.
A real danger seems like it would be MS starting to enforce their patents. It even looks like
Not A Good thing, since much of the Samba development takes place in Australia.
/Styx
Please. Patents have nothing to do with copyright. YANAL.
The difference is that the first few hits of crack are acknowledged as free and the dealer doesn't threaten to sue for copyright violation.
will thus HAVE TO support SMB for compatibility reasons Oh, yeah, sure. Go on living in a box. M$ will not be offering any support (software or otherwise for win98 and below as of a few short months from now. I'd post a link, but dont know where I found it at on the M$ site. I beleive it was hidden away back in the licence info. Bill Gates wants you to use his latest little money maker. He couldn't give a rats ass about some sorry pos 386 running 3.1 (for example) because thats a) not where the money is, and b)thats not where the emerging technology is. Resistance is futile...
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Hey, that would work, wouldn't it....
And they couldn't use the freedom to innovate ploy to squirm their way out of it....
Good Idea(tm)
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Replace the word, SAMBA, with java in the above comment. Do you know any "major customers" that have any investment in java?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I use samba every day for NT4 & 5. What kind of complaint could I write to Ms?
...What if the SAMBA project team had the patent?
M$ would be helpless? Probably so. We've seen some of M$'s patents fail before.
patents control use. yes, it would be illegal to use the infringing product without a patent license.
however, patents aren't a matter of criminal law, unlike copyright. you can't be arrested for infringing a patent. you can only be sued. most likely, the patentholder would get an injunction against you using the patented process. theoretically, the holder could also get damages. they'd only bother with that if you were a big organization that they could suck a lot of money out of.
violating the injunction could land you in jail, for contempt of court. however, you still wouldn't get a criminal record and would normally be let out when the judge decided you were going to comply with the injunction. on the other hand, there's no limit to contempt of court: the judge can keep you there forever. so it's generally a good idea to obey injunctions. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Its too bad, I use SAMBA on a daily basis at work, and I've slowly been convincing managment about the benifits of Linux to Windows. So far we have 4 out of 56 boxes running Corel Linux!!
But I can see if SAMBA gets busted up, a lot of people in the same situation as mine will run into a lot more problems convincing people to run the new and mysterious 'Linux' (fav. quote from work: "Is that new? I've never even heard of a 'Linux' computer?").
This means more $$$$ for Microsoft. I mean this in the most serious way, but DONT THEY HAVE ENOUGH?
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
PDF is owned (patented?) by Adobe.
Actually it was me that said "SMB sucks", although tridge has mentioned similar statements :-).
:-). Tridge and I have speculated that we're both part of some wierd gestalt entity in people's minds :-).
But I understand. People over here think we're both Australian for some reason
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Trying to remember from my Win2k class waaay back when it was beta whatever.
I seem to think that when a Win2k system talks to another Win2k system for file access, it uses LDAP rather than CIFS or SMB. Supposedly its a lot faster method.
Now, I'm not sure if I was smoking something real good that day, or if its true. But would this be a better way to access files than SMB?
An interesting quote I found on the net... Microsoft has renamed its SMB protocol implementation "CIFS" (Common Internet File System) in a marketing effort to make it an "open" protocol.
But if you do, you get arrested if you ever entre the US.
Ernest J.W. ter Kuile
A much better solution, IMHO, would be to port a Free NFS client/server to windows.
My future's determined by Thieves, thugs, and vermin -- The Offspring
So if he wants an "intelligent" discussion, perhaps he would have been better served to choose his language carefully.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
doesn't matter, at least in the case of patents. dmca is another issue.
patents require registration in the country where they're applied.
that means that if M$ holds a valid U.S. patent, they can forbid you from using the process in the U.S.
you can avoid this patent by moving to a country where the patent has not been registered. That's how Zimmerman got around the RSA patents.
even if that country later on recognizes software patents, it can't register them retroactively. that's a universal precept of patent law.
'course, if people use your infringing product in a country where the patent is valid, they're facing potential liability themselves. that's why PGP was illegal to import into the U.S. for a long time.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
It won't be the end of Samba, because her mother, Simba, and father, Mjimba (the king of the jungle I might add) will protect her. In fact, I suspect that Mjimba would disembowel any Microsoft weenie who tried to lay a hand his favorite daughter, leaving the carcass to the hyenas.
Legal, no. Between UCITA and DMCA reverse engineering the new format will be illegal. Besides, it's patented. You don't really think MS will license the patent royalty free to open source/free software developers do you?
Best Slashdot Co
Samba team should 'embrace and extend' existing netbios to be more unix-type filesystem savvy, including file modes, ownership, md5 and plaintext passwords and MIME type and submit rfs calling it smbng or some such and forcing M$ to follow an existing standard or break it. If M$ breaks it provide gpl'ed free client to Win users or jury-rigging to make "web folders" work with samba.
The real solution as I see it is gnutella protocol (short-term) and JXTA or something like it (longer-term). I find private gnutella servers on my network are a nice way to keep files I care about accessible without browsing through a hierarchy of stuff. I can search my network for 'radio' and get back every file with radio in the name in seconds and search and sort in a gnutella client quicker than I can browse all my home machines and the silly directory structures that have evolved on them. Because gnutella is basically http with a few modifications, any http-savvy application (many if not most that I use) can read the file as it comes down the wire. There are problems with the approach (versioning, modifying files, getting entire directories, access control, broadcasting/announcing nodes, redundancy, basically there's no meta-information framework) but with a few modifications to the gnutella protocol there are amazing applications for home and enterprise users.
AC's cheerfully ignored
Ever heard of Walt Whiteman? His grammer was awful. His language was considered sub-par and many an enlightened person considered his work rubbish. Those enlightened people are long forgotten, but Mr. Whiteman's work lives on. In fact I recall a previous US president gives a copy of "Leaves of Grass" to his girlfriends. (I'm no Walt Whiteman, nor am I implying such. I'm pointing out that content and ideas relayed are what's important, especially in such an informal place as /.)
So, when you originally are challenging the reader to think of something "intelligent" before replying, we are to presume that you put your full intelligence into the question?
Shouldn't you have said "when you originally challenged the reader...."? Isn't this sentence considered an overly verbose sentence (or whatever your English teacher calls these things)?
Aren't posts about grammer instead of the topic stupid, idiodic and pointless?
Pay attention now sparky; I'm going to rephrase the question, and let us see if you can follow.
For those that missed out .NET initiative?"
The question I asked was "Should the open source community try and copy or imitate the
What I was hoping for was some sort of semi-thought out response along the lines of "Yes, the open source community needs to or should develop a .NET because X Y Z" or "No the open source community shouldn't because of P D Q".
Thank You
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
And you think they'll balk at that why exactly? Not only will they not have a problem with it, they seem to be actively doing so as an incentive to get people to upgrade. Witness the number of times they've changed file formats in Word for no apparent reason. And how they refuse to backport useful bits to previous versions of Windows (USB support being a good example).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
How the hell do you downloaded it if your router just stopped speaking TCP/IP? You can't replace TCP/IP anymore with something else *instantly*, because there's no other way than TCP/IP to get the replacement to people effectively.
I wish, I wish, I wish I still had those 4 mod points I didn't use.
This is a fan-fucking-tastic idea.
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.
Yes, the nick is flamebait
Or better - the techies should become the bosses. Internet execs are notoriously stupid. They shouldn't last too much longer.
SAMBA is not only linux centric. Many other OSes use samba for windows integration (even there is novell netware 4.x version).
:-)
Yep, I compiled Samba on Mac OS X with no problems. Runs just fine.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
SMB is the protocol used by "Client for Microsoft Networks" and "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" under Windows. Samba is an open-source SMB-compatible client/server. I don't know what CIFS is, and I'm too lazy to check. As for working around whatever Microsoft does, I'm a little confused myself - I have feeling people are making a huge deal about something that won't even be a problem. Not to defend Microsoft, but I am not seeing the issue here.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
But ummm what for? So I can access windows servers from windows clients?
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
int initSMBCompatChk() { if (!sigcmp( sigupdate( hs_connect( "microsoft.Net", gethash(CPU_ID, OS_KEY, getpassportkey(LOCAL), gethwchecksum(), ip_addr, time()), SIG_UPDATE_REQUEST) == gethsig(CURRENT_MACHINE_USER)) { exit(-31337); } else if (OS_TYPE == "DRDOS") { exit(-1); } else { char * tmp[1]= (char*) malloc(srand(SMALL_MEMLEAK)); return(SIG_OK) } //**TODO: Convert to Hungarian notation & free tmp
Well -actually- microsoft was long time against TCP/IP (in the late 80ies, early 90ies), the first SMB nets weren't TCP/IP at all, but used a direct layer they called "Netbios". Then they were -actually- against the internet at all. Remember back? They used to favorize the "Microsoft Net". Controlled central by, guess who? :o) TCP/IP was a unix idea, and favorized by unix systems, you see today who won this fight on the long run? However microsoft writes it's own history, theres not written: "we have fatally lost this fight, so now we're using TCP/IP and the internet."
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
I guess the answer for which you're looking here is a really big "yes?" Duh, lots of companies use Java, just not the outdated and unsupported Microsoft Java tools. end of line
end of line
No, but I feel compelled to admit that I once saw the Village People at the Village Gate in NYC, got backstage, and walked away with a bunch of autographs, along with an invite to a party with the band in Provincetown RI following their show there.
And I didn't even have to handle anyone's privy member.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
that is not what the patent system was created for, it was created for the lone inventor to get some cash for the large aomount of time and work he put in to give a technology to the world. it was not visioned as a way for a multi-hunderd-billion corperation, who spends 1/100000 of their budeget on creating an algerithem, to sqweese the blood out of the compatition to maintain a monopoly.
M$ is acting as arogent as ever, and that will be their down fall. if they piss this judge off, I dobt that the appeals court will give them another chance.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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)
... the petition against software patents here.
/. readers that haven't done it yet : sign ! sign ! sign !
so, for those (hopefully rare)
I did understand what you wrote. Millions of people understand what George W. Bush says when he fouls up the language in his speeches and comments to the press. And just as those millions of people place less value on Bush's words because he lacks a good command of his language, so people will place less value in your words when you do the same.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
THe way I see it, if the GPL is ruled unenforcable that would make it highly likely that most of the other software licences would be unenforcable as well. it would be a huge precedent and might make life (in a computer software sense) very interesting for a while
dave
"I'll pass judgement after I see it."
CmdrTaco on 08:36 PM August 6th, 2001
Guess that only applies to Star Wars, but not to anything really important. Good thing he isn't a REAL journalist.
So they license the technology to people like Sun, Novell, and anyone else who wants to pay for it.
The combination of a patent, use restrictions, and licensing fee would put it out of reach for any Free/free programs. Even if it could be clean-room reverse engineered, they could make it a moving target even more than it is now.
load "linux",8,1
Having a Samba file system driver means that all of a sudden you have to update every last one of your client machines. Not only that, but you probably have to watch out for Microsoft breaking your driver with a Windows Update. Microsoft isn't particularly likely to break their driver, on the other hand, so you are safe as long as your file servers mimic a Windows server.
SMB is a horrific kludge of a filesystem, and the Samba developers will all happily acknowledge that. If you want to install file system drivers you would probably be better off using some other network file system. The beauty of SMB, however, is that every single Microsoft OS ever has a built in client. Leveraging that built in client saves adminstrators time and money.
You are wrong on all of your points,
.NET proprietary, because they want everyone to submit, and go strictly with Microsoft products. Look at what they tried to do with Java?
Yes microsoft wants to make
On your last point, I think that stealing money from the hard working people of this country and blowing much of it on failing social programs, and giving the rest of it away to the fuck-ups (who spent their days smoking crack and procreating while I was in college) of the world is the biggest crackpot idea. eh? (A family earning $80,000/year is taxed 28%/yr (this is only federal income tax))
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
The worst: MS uses some crummy patent and gets DMCA import restrictions on all future SAMBA so that it could not be legaly used by any US company or any other DMCA slave state companies.
Enough BS like this from MS will make people think if Word documents are worth the price paid.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This doesn't just put a clamp on Linux users. At my job, we use Samba on AIX machines to provide users access to certain translation tables. With Microsoft's new forced upgrade scheme, what's a business that doesn't want to pay extra to downgrade supposed to do in this situation?
if you read the article you would know that the particular patent which raised the question relates to password changeing....
Leaving SMB would mean W95/98/ME and even NT4.0/5.0 would not be able to share files with the newer MS OSes. As long as these old Microsoft OS can communicate with the next MS OS, so will Samba. I doubt MS would break file sharing between NT4.0/5.0 and future OSes.
They threw out NTLM, in came Kerberos
They threw out WINS, in came DDNS
I wouldn't worry too much yet...
How long did it take them to pay attention to their own customers and get rid of clippy? Four years? How long did it take them to write an SMTP server that allows for conditional relaying like everyone else instead of all open or all closed relaying? Oh wait; they haven't done that yet.
This is closer to an admittance by Microsoft that other systems exist, and they are unwelcome interlopers in an M$-centric network. Leaving the old LAN Manager authentication in, using the same file sharing technology for years, M$ basically didn't see the need to change anything because, after all, no one was using anything but M$ products, right?
So with a step like this, M$ is saying "We know you're not using our products everywhere, so we're going to try to come up with another way to make you pay for our lousy tech".
So now we need a robust file sharing system that works like SMB/NFS/etc from a web browser - cross platform joyousness for the client, apache on whateveryouwant for the server....
--mandi
The problem is, instead of Microsoft going after the developers, they will simply go after any business user that uses the software. Just because something is legal where it's made, doesn't mean it is legal to import and use it here...
This is exactly the sort of thing the remedy sought by the Justice Department should address. MS should be required to open up all APIs and document formats.
See, there's the problem... "a few other tech's". "few" and "tech's" being the key words. Microsoft knows that only the technically-oriented people are going to care at all, most of those probably won't be able to switch from Windows, and the ones that do will eventually find themselves having to switch back because they can't interoperate with something they need to. Don't just look at this one thing that Microsoft does, keep in mind that they're going to keep doing things like this. Sure, today it's just Samba you can't use without paying royalties, but sooner or later more things will be embraced and extended, and the people who could afford to switch today won't be able to stay away forever. And those that have to switch back make terrific case studies of how Linux and any other alternate technology is inadequate, don't they?
No, I didn't read the goddamned article.
Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson just turned over in their graves.
Monopolies (even when they are introduced by the government) always hurt the market. Just look at Wall St. We should look at different rewards for patents than monopolies.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
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.
Actually wasn't MS's TCP/IP stack not true to the full open standard set? From what I heard and seen around the net this they arent fully compliant with the standards until XP is released. And dont forget the Kerberos tickets in Win2k.. How they took a standard protocol, played with it, tack on "Microsoft" to the front of it and now they have "Microsoft Kerberos". Sure, you can authenticate to a *NIX box, but the *NIX box cant authenticate to your Win2k box.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Unless they, oh... released a driver for NT and 2K.
You mean like WebDAV? Done. MS is even compatible in IE5.5 (Web Folders). Mac has davfs, and gnome-vfs has webdav support, too.
MRSH-Recording device, corned beef sandwich with kraut, seafaring bird, and the foamy top of a beverage.
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.
> Actually, it is the "best interconnectivity" is "Our Internconnectivity"
Sorry; I should have quoted the original poster's "between MS networking protocols and UNIX". For that particular kind of interconnectivity, "none" is what MS likes best.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
..might as well go the whole hog and clone all of windows (gpl, of course)....
Remember, with the notable exception of ANSI & ISO, most 'standards committees' are industry groups formed for specific purposes and with rules based upon varying goals.
At the risk of being flamed, W2K still does NetBEUI. It can support not only NT4 but anything from DOS on up.
There are fancy things which require everything running W2K to be able to do, but as far as basic connectivity W2K supports everything. Even SAMBA, because SAMBA operates like SMB did in NT4.
I have no idea about XP because I don't even want to touch that mess when it comes out.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Bastards were bound to do it eventually.
What are the chances that some sort of driver could be devised that would let MSWin machines share according to something that Samba would be compatible with and still be able to authenticate against AD or the domain AND still be fast? Knowing MS, that would be listed as a bad driver and excluded from being loaded into the machine.
Of course, for those of us using NetApps, Snap Appliances, and Maxtor MaxAttach units, the technology is updated with any patches the companies release. If they do this, they're going to alienate a lot of companies that do Samba-like products. But life will find a way around this, too.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
As a networked OS anyway. There are a lot of offices and homes using SAMBA as the filesharing protocol because it's nearly transparent to the winlusers...I'll never buy OR use an MS os that doesn't have working SAMBA interoperabilty--but then I'll never give MS my credit card # either, so I'm already out of the loop.
.NET is going to be the end of MS--it will fail when people realize they're paying more--a lot more--for less. People will just keep using win2k, win98 and 95 and ME and local versions of Office rather than paying through the nose for .NET and MS products with broken filesharing
Bad call--bad call. My prediction is that
Of course, I could be wrong, but I know what my family and clients will be doing.
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.
Once the Samba Team did the work and built a port of the new protocol, they would never be able to visit the US, or they would be arrested by the Microsoft Division of the FBI.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Actually, I think that applies to encryption/decryption utilities (hardware and/or software), not an actual encrypted document itself.
If they reverse engineer it, they are breaking patent law, not copyright law.
Of course the way around it may be to place a password encryption server in Europe or other place that doesn't recognize software patents, then hit that server with the encryption request (using a different form of encryption so there's no plaintext)
> samba still cannot serve the "user list" to
:-) :-).
> windows 9x machines for USER level sharing.
Finally fixed in Samba 2.2.1a. I'm sure you'll now upgrade...
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
I know that Slashdot isn't the best palce to go for an opinion on legal issues, but does anyone have any idea if it would be legal to download and use a product that violates a US patent. I've heard of companies getting injunctions against other companies distributing products that violate their patents. However, if the distributers are outside the US, would it be illegal to use the software itself in the US?
> Samba is the best if not only solution for interconnectivity between MS networking protocols and Unix ... but yet MS intends to cut this off.
From Micorsoft's perspective, the "best interconnectivity" is "no interconnectivity".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is potentially a very important problem for linux users. I would say almost all of our networks have to interface with Windows machines somewhere along the line. It is essential that we can share files between them in a simple and uniform way. How many linux boxes exist only for use as a file server? I know that I have two.
It is so frustrating that nobody (DoJ) puts an end to this. Finally some decent competition comes along and once again Microsoft refuses to be fair and just squashes the competition. Obviously it hasn't come to that yet, and hopefully never will, but who knows what could happen? Then again this could be just a nasty rumour..
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Getting rid of SAMBA... not a bad idea. While they're at it, they should get rid of COUNTRY and DISCO.
bp
I doubt microsoft can ignore all these systems. People will not easily dump their workstations for NT...
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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).
They should have called it "CIFLS", pronounced "syphilis". Perhaps the 'L' can be implied. "First I got Mono, but then I realized that I also got CIFLS in the same transaction."
Hm, yesterday we were told that we wouldn't be able to use Unix to talk toWindows because of "TCP/MS"-extensions, anyways...
Sheeesh.
Maybe getting rid of this irritating, spamming, networking system is a step in the right direction. MicroSoft Networking is certainly NOT the pinnacle of good design or implementation. Hopefully their own system will be much better.
ghaa.
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
"Europe" won't be doing anything in a hurry: the responsibility lies with the EPO which has its own legislative and executive bodies, not the EU, even though it is some people in the EU Commission which are giving us some concern. Patents are governed by international treaties, and remember it takes decades to change treaties. The WTO's agenda is set years in advance and software patents are very low on the priority list. For the current proposals see the report "Does the TRIPS Agreement require all member's rules on protection of intellectual property to be identical?" for an explanation.
The UK response to a recent initiative to re-look at software patents was firmly negative, and there is a Europe-wide campaigning body to ensure that it doesn't happen "by accident".
First off - Billy does listen to the big corps. They pay him, unlike the government. If they stop buying his stuff, he is *gone*. He doesn't care about the government because they don't represent a revenue stream.
Secondly, our users don't ever install JVM's. As someone pointed out, our most important Java is server side. But we do have client side Java (mainly Swing, some other bits and pieces) - the JVM is installed and maintained by our tech support groups, not the users.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
First, samba is a specific package. What you want is a CIFS (used to be SMB) driver.
There used to be third party products, but my understanding is that samba killed them all. And being 3rd party wouldn't help anyway, unless you manage to get into the Microsoft Shared Source program.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Actually, that depends on install base of all products on the market.
If M$ make more and more incompatible, then they'll end up making them not work with all the stuff that's out there (I know people, home users, who're still happy using DOS or Win 3.x because they simply don't need more).
At the moment, all this 'old' install base works quite happily, so they carry on adding to the figures that MS is compliant with.
Now, should MS break legacy compliancy, they'll irritate a lot of people who now can't communicate with the legacy MS installations, who need to look elsewhere (as they often loathe buying a whole new PC just so they can view the latest MS word files).
The whole point of MS keeping market share is to make things just compliant enough that old MS tech works, while making nudges that the new software is worth the cost of an upgrade.
Breaking the compliancy will remove a lot of legacy systems which will likely move to open source solutions/other compliant commercial systems, eroding MS Market share.
Rather than that hitting MS badly, they'll just improve legacy support in patches, making sure that all the open source stuff works with the latest MS.
Legacy is the whole reason we have the x86 architecture around still today.. And it'll be the reason that things still carry on working (to an extent) with MS into the future.
Malk
Further erosion of our rights. If reverse engineering software had been illegal in the early 60's we'd all still be using over-priced IBM PCs. Lawmakers have no clue what they have done to the future of technology.
...you should be able to find it in some online patent database. Once you have access to the patent, it shouldn't be too hard to implement microsoft's idea different enough so that it is both interoperable and doesn't infringe the patent.
Next MS will get rid of TCP/IP and replace it with some new proprietart patented protocol. Real TCP/IP will only be made available as a gateway network device on NT Server. i.e., your ISP must purchase the expen$ive converter. While you puny windows peons must use the MS protocol, which will no doubt made downloadable as an addon for 95/98/ME/etc.
Who do you think will have to change? The executives who make the decisions and run the company, or the workers under them?
In >99% of the companies, the executive decision is the one that gets acted on. And stupid or not, in most cases, the executives will what they like best, which is what they're familiar with, which is Microsoft products. Admin and sales aren't going to change for you. If MS & Unix become incompatible by MS actions, in most cases the execs will just order that the admin and production networks become separate because they don't want to look like weenies trying to relearn a system when they really don't even know Windows very well yet.
We've got to find a MUCH better answer than "the techs like it better".
Somebody should whack our PHBs and government types in the head and inform them that open standards and interoperabilty are good things -- you could make an argument for them being in the best interests of society at large.
Maybe the next time the gov't drags them into court, they need to force them to accept and support open, documented, un-M$-ified standards for key technologies. Like file formats, network protocols, etc, etc.
For the life of me, I can't understand why any (non-secret) government agencies use any black-box software. Why don't librarians, historians and like people raise the alarm? Why is this even a geek issue?!!
OK it's time to make a major structional change in my IT department. We've been using Win2K and NT4 long enough. I'm going to start converting my Win2K servers to BSD and my clients to Linux. I've just downloaded the free version for Solaris 8 on Intel. Has anyone deployed this?
> Saving us all from better products at little or no cost for bloatware...
Of course. What the heck are patents good for, if you can't use them to cut off the competition's air supply?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This whould allow Microsoft to "innovate" as much as they want but allow competition by allowing others to freely clone their products & technologies.
Of course MS would complain "Waaah they are taking away our property and giving it to others!". They would be right in a way, but it's not like they they took away Bill's wonderful home or something.
I know its been said to death, but really, royalties for patent owners for software should be limited to 1 year. Maybe 2. We all know software is pretty much obsolete after around 5 - 10 years. (ie, I'll take a guess that .Net will be around for maybe 10 years, if it's a commercial success.)
/talk/ to your software, can afford.
So the licencing wouldn't be prohibitive if you knew you only had to pay it for a limited time within the lifetime of the technology. Copyrights are supposed to help the inventor, but open up the forum to royalty-free competition while the invention is still viable and useful. This would foster more participants in the arena of competing technologies, and thus, more innovation. And we wouldn't be wondering if Microsoft ringing the death knell for SAMBA.
All of which is not withstanding the scary idea that developing a technology for 'changing passwords' should not entitle you to more royalty payments than a developer, of a technology which only wants to
Frightening.
US Patent Office: Selling monopoly rights to common sense for over 25 years. (Yes, I own the tee-shirt.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
+You don't really think Microsoft exposes all the
:-) :-).
:-/.
:}) builds and runs just fine under cygwin on windows. IO've successfully used it while we developed squid's NTLM integration (and thanks again to the SAMBA team ! ).
+needed API's to write a redirector without
+getting WNT/W2K source code access, do you ?
Certainly not. I've done a chunk of research into being able to build an IFS driver for NFS and/or a IFS driver for UMSDOS for cygwin. The Windows 2000 DDK is in the thousands of US dollars range - out of my league as a for-interest hacker. Cygwin itself can pretend to offer filesystems, but that doesn't let the general windows case do much.
+ There's not even a"redirector writers kit" you
+ can buy ! Microsoft doesn't *want* people to be
+able to write replacement redirectors. If you
+could do that, you might reduce dependencies on
+Windows Domain/ADS servers - why, you might even
+plug in your own authentication client, removing
+the need for a PDC/ADS server ! That would never
+do, now would it. Where would the monopoly go
+then ?
I strongly suggest you get in contact with Corinna Vinschen of Red Hat. She's written a sub-authenticator for NT for use with cygwin - to allow "su" without a password to work on NT. Thats a big step in the right direction. I don't know how much practical help that is to building a SAM-like replacement, but if Novell can do it, then for sure we can.
+ Why do you think all the PC/NFS products don't
+work very well ? Why do you think anyone who has
+to support Windows clients in a serious way (for
+a NAS product etc.) has to implement SMB ? It
+isn't because it's a beautiful or elegent
+protocol
I thought it was selection of the fittest
Seriously though, speaking from experience, an old version of the smbval library (smblib.c has version 1.0
Rob
I doubt that MS are going to ditch support with all of the previous versions of Windows just to get rid of SAMBA, somehow.
.net only features, but I bet SMB will be around for a long time to come.
They might add some funky new
Meep meep
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
It is a valid point that supporting a protocol too early might actually help the protocol gain acceptance.
But where do you draw the line on when to start? How ubiquitous is ubiquitous enough? Is it a good idea to have a project underway so that that you have a bit of a jump start if the protocol does start taking off? Or is it better to wait until the protocol is extremely ubiquitous, and then your Linux servers are at a disadvantage for two or three years until the projects reach maturity?
These are all difficult questions, and the answers may depend on timing. When Samba was started, Linux was still a small player in the server market, and in fact Samba was one of the things that spurred Linux in to popularity. Now that many users and businesses depend on Linux servers, it will probably mean that there will be higher expectations that protocols be supported sooner.
Is it a waste of time to start such a project before a protocol becmoes ubiquitous? I suppose it depend on the ultimate outcome. It is a risk, and life is full of risks. The downside is that some people will have wasted their time (and maybe some money) if the protocol flops. But the upside could be the success of Linux in another server market if the protocol proves to be popular.
Ovbiously there's no easy answer, and I agree that implementing *all* MS standards willy-nilly is probably unproductive, and that implementing MS standards before they become ubiquitous involves some risk. Not all risk taking is bad, however, and if the potential upside is large, I'm not sure I would call it insane.
Microsoft must be overjoyed that Mac OS X.1 and Linux and Unix all have popular SMB clients. Woo hoo! Desktops of all kinds are locking in the value of having a nice Microsoft-controlled backoffice.
It's the servers of SMB which are the thorn in Microsoft's side. A decent Samba server runs on Linux just fine, which robs Microsoft of all that wonderful lock-in. A Microsoft backoffice solution can be replaced with a drop-in equivalent, and not one desktop user even notices the difference (except there's fewer i.t. emails out to the organization about downtime).
Every time a fully functional drop-in replacement is possible, Microsoft will attempt to change the game to break that possibility. Desktops are hard to replace fully, because every single user has to make a very personal commitment (either by paycheck or choice) to learn all the little differences. Servers are easy to replace without much hardship, and Microsoft knows this. Hence, .net and kerberos tweaks and other closed or extended standards.
[
or in any county that has extradition treaties with the US. Or that does business with the MPAA.
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.
.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.
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
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
>What next, Microsoft(R) TCP/IP(R)?
Nah, they are having too much fun ripping that off from BSD. Just run strings.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Explain CIFS, Samba, SMB, and how these things relate to each other and why Microsoft blocking them would be a bad thing and why you couldn't work around if they did and what would this affect people who don't bother to upgrade from their current NT/2k boxes to XP?
Thanks in advance
[o]_O
It won't work. Samba requires working seteuid() calls, and full POSIX locking functionality, which is not possible to emulate in a Win32 program (although probably possible in a native NT API program, via hidden calls - you know, the ones Microsoft claim don't exist :-).
That's why Microsoft's "Services for UNIX" product must have a kernel component - Win32 locking is unbearably primitive compared to POSIX locking. We can emulate Win32 locking semantics on top of POSIX, but it's not possible to do this the other way around.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Billy Boy wants total world control. He's not going to give up any segment of the market, not even elevator controllers running DOS3. Because he knows that won't or can't upgrade and will migrate to other non-MS solutions if he doesn't maintain some support for such markets. That "upgrade or get screwed" shit only applies to the desktop user. The business world is a different beast entirely. And you'll never see the lates MS stuff in any mission critical systems. Such systems are still running DOS because it's known to be stable or has all bugs fully known and coded to be avoided. What is known RIGHT NOW about all existing instabilities in Whistler? Fucking nothing.
The article talks about patents, and how if Microsoft were to integrate some form of patented technology into their authentication system it may require Samba to license it.
.Net and Mono.
It's just a general discussion about patents and how they might impact an Open Source project. They use Samba as an example, but are primarily referring to
Hey Mr. Taco... Read the article next time before posting a comment about it.
Yes, you will, but many, many people do that. I am not sure what your argument is. M$, as well most, if not all, OS vendors give you API's/source to deal with. They cannot exclude you from developing on their platforms anymore than they do for anyone else. Again, I am not sure what your point is. Security product vendors hook into the network stack/filesystem (yes, even on windows) all the time. Maybe i am missing something...?
Intelligence is like four wheel drive, having it just means you'll get stuck in more remote places.
Which is not actually samba, but another filesharing project. That's the only novell integration/open source project I've seen. PS- It works ok, for some stuff, but I wouldn't want to run all my users off of MARS.
It's nota my planet, monkey-boy - Dr Lizardo.
I wonder if people in other countries look at the US kind of like they look at Microsoft. We have a unreasonable licensing agreements (laws like the DCMA). We stick our noses into everything. We tie different packages together (you want monetary of military aid, then you better pass these copyright and drug laws). The only organization that might be more like MS is the UN.
wow, too many x-files episodes buddy.
you can't be arrested for violating patent law. not even in the United States. it's purely civil. you can only be sued by the patentholders. so what's happening to Dmitry can't happen when you're talking patents.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
What about creating a BETTER platform for file sharing? Why do we always have to follow M$? Why cant we create a ubiquitous file sharing mechanism??? One that is totally independent of M$ that users can download and use just as they would use something like winzip, their browser of choice, etc.? As a developer from both sides of the OS war, I see some real potential from a business perspective for something of the sort. Yeah, yeah, i know...someone is gonna flame me with NFS, or something along those lines, but I am talking about something easy and ubiquitous across all OS's. Anyone else? If any developers read this and are at least somewhat serious, why not respond, and maybe we can get a sourceforge site...peace
Intelligence is like four wheel drive, having it just means you'll get stuck in more remote places.
Umm...successful at what? Certainly no one is making the gobs of money MS is used to.
Really what economic reason can be given for them to change their behavior? Because if there is a valid one, and not just "Microsoft should play nice because its the right thing to do", they will change their tune in a heartbeat.
Lets also not forget, Samba was always about working around Microsoft networking - coding around their API's. They are all public, so there is no reason they can't do so again. Patent or no patent, it is legal to perform reverse engineering to ensure compatibility.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Do you use Windows, then, as the only one of the tech-guys? From the context, it seemed that the original poster meant "admin" as in "administrative staff" as in "executives", not as in "sysadmin".
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Actually, U.S. law applies only in U.S. territory, even in Dmitry's case. The thing he was arrested for he did on U.S. soil.
Just like Americans can be and are arrested in foreign countries for breaking the laws of those countries.
The DMCA is stupid, there's no two ways about it. But don't get excited about U.S. law being applied to Russians in their homeland, because it's not.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The more they screw with people the deeper a hole they dig for themselves. I applaud Miguel for the Mono project. Even if the project crashes and burns, ESPECIALLY if it is due to Microsoft being as nasty as usual, then that is just more ammunition in court. I say give them as much rope as they want to hang themselves with.
I find the irony here delicious. By being such a pompous ass, Microsoft has given rise to a tailor made competitor. If they start to play fair, they will lose. If they continue to break the law they will lose. It is only a matter of time.
http://james.nontrivial.org
And like I said, consider that Microsoft is going to keep doing stuff like this. Like you said, they'll release patches for legacy stuff. Legacy Microsoft stuff. They have such a huge market share, they don't have to care about anybody else. Besides, what do they care if they piss off Novell's customers? Those pissed off customers will have to buy Microsoft products, and whether a customer is happy or not, they're still a customer.
No, I didn't read the goddamned article.
Yes indeed, the buying decisions usually are made by admin and even some by sales. That's why things do fuck up so much. Just a couple weeks ago I was helping some guy try to work around a major buying mistake (to the tune of half a million dollars) the accounting people made by buying a bunch of computers with the wrong specifications. That's why techies need to break out of their shells (figuratively) and start cluing the bosses in on what actually works to save the company money.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Mr fly will soon see that, so be quiet and let him think.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Press CDs. Put them everywhere. CompUSA, Circuit City, Target, Wal-Mart...
If AOL can do it, why can't someone like Microsoft? Issuing a patch CD is feasible, especially if it means tightening your grip on the Internet.
Why haven't they done it before? Cost vs. return. If you issue free update CDs every (month|quarter|year) then you're removing a major reason behind upgrading - the inconvenience of downloading service packs and hotfixes. That'd cut into their revenue stream. Converting everyone to MS/TCP? Financially, it'd have a huge positive effect on Microsoft's bottom line.
Lastly, go read Cringely's article, where the idea came about last week.
The Death of TCP/IP
So dose this mean that the GNU group should edit it's license so that it says when ever a microsoft computer uses a Sendmail services or BIND services or apache Service or any onther *nix Service that we get to charge them a licence fee to interface with it. I wonder how many microsoft users would jump ship If the internet was taken back my *nix. 25 cents for each DNS lookup. Kick ass! Is so this could fund the FSF for a very long time.
Well, they better get busy upgrading to a P3/4 real soon now, hadn't they?
Sure, "upgrading" creates a larger footprint, but do you honestly think MS cares? If you want to use MS software, you need to play by MS's rules.
So if they're patenting this, does this mean that people either pay or risk the Wrath of Redmond for violating the DMCA by not paying?
Wow. Who'd have guessed that it'd be game, set, match already?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Then a client for Windos is written. Voila!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Allison said he inadvertently learned of a patent from "a high Microsoft official"
I don't know what MS has been smoking lately, but they've obviously smoked it all.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
As you know, the internet runs on connections. The crypt is a wonderful idea other than the fact that any country that hosts it will be put under enourmous pressure by other nations to kill it or bring themselves to the same standards as other nations. Even an oil rig in the middle of international waters needs a feed out, and what's it going to do when the land line is cut by the country whose traffic it passes through? At this point your best bet would be to park a rig off of China; they have enough clout and obstinance to give WIPO/UN/US the finger for years to come.
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
Without a patent number, regardless of how you'd have to go about finding it out, the article could have said that M$ holds a patent on using ASCII letters to make the word SAMBA and I still wouldn't be worried yet.
Wary, yes, but not worried.
[1] And sorry for taking the flamebait, but CHRIST I wish people would stop throwing that fucking accusation around!
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?
I mean, they always do that, don't they?
-- Colin
I find it apalling that Microsoft wants this PR battle. I know several banking software RS/6000 machines that run Samba for farming out Windows client installation programs.
Aside from this, I would like to see a different client all-together that works from Windows to anything else that is encrypted and compressed. Maybe some melding of ssh and nfs?
Click here or here.
Microsoft really has the best interests of everyone at heart. Never ever ever ever would anyone at Microsoft want to develop proprietory software to stop the free flow of ideas and/or stop the freedom to communicate between all people from all ethinic and financial backgrounds and across any platform. Of course we at microsoft want Windows to do well but we will not leverage our market share to drive others out of business, nor develop new projects to do so. Our business is committed to ethics, sharing and the betterment of mankind and all it's projects. We are not at all interested in market share and profits. We just want to make everyone happy. Our attempts to control the web with initatives such as .NET and certification are only our altruistic efforts to protect the young and the innocent on the world wide web. Microsoft loves you. =)
Considering how many companies are running their windows fileservers on linux (possibly without the management knowing), it's quite possible that MS has already lost control of the filesharing protocol to the point that they can't really extend it now. If they'd stuck something with a patent in originally, they might have a chance, but if the deal is that, in order to talk to standard XP clients (or servers?) you need to use MS stuff, people are likely to just use 3rd party stuff because their existing infrastructure requires the old version.
Without keeping backwards compatablity with NT 4.0
and Windows 2000. Of course they could always supply "patches" for NT 4.0 and W2k that will "allow" them to use the new password protocol. But my favorite solution is to host the project in a country were patents do not matter. Let's say Russia.
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
The way things are hinted in the article, the patent is over some encyphering code. This of course makes things worse. So even if the encoding is stupid, finding prior art can be quite a challenge.
Also imagine MS lawyers hinting that somme Intellectual Property might be on the SMB server, and that the open-source project not only violates their patent, but was reverse ingeniering on some of their protection schemes, so they invoke the DCMA. It might not be very logical, but MS lawyers managed more bizzare things.
At the next linux conference, send the FBI guys. Voilà, open-source problem solved.
" 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. " Because the have realised that they got rich by locking out competitors.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
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.
Unfortunately, that is not what will happen. The business weenies will cry, "We need Outlook. We need Crystal Reports. We need Solitaire." The suits think they need Microsoft software. They will force the techies to migrate to Windows.
Transcript show: self sigs atRandom.
ok so an organization opens up to create the nesisary packages for samba for each distro. then admins can just go and DL it from the site. big deal, we are Linux admins, not windows admins :-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
US law even apparently applies to Russian soil. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov. The US gov't believes its law applies worldwide. And Russia isn't screaming blooddy murder about it! (Why not?!)
No one is safe, unless perhaps they decide to NEVER visit the US ever again. Even that might not be enough, just look at Manuel Noriega. Kidnapped by the US in a miltary raid and imprisoned in a US jail.
And the US would be very likely to bomb any rig out in international waters. We'd justify its destruction and the killing of its workers by saying we were protecting the US economy from economic terrorism and all our sheep/citizens will bleat their approval. And with it having been in international waters, we wouldn't be in trouble with any other country for violating its sovereignty.
Not that international law has ever (in practice) ever applied to the US ... just look at how many treaties we violate.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I misread his post. Good catch.
Best Slashdot Co
Three words: Tactical Nuclear Weapons
:wq
This is FUD, a pure and perfect example of FUD. ZDnet is getting worse evey year.
So, it would appear, is Slashdot.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Well then, I guess (and strongly recommend) that the Open Source group start up it's own patent bank. This bank of patents would be free to anyone who GPLs their code, but commercial products would be required to pay royalties to the GNU Foundation.
This is going to be the only way that free software will win.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Samba isn't the only way to link Windows and Unix. NFS works just as well. But you have to buy an NFS client for Windows. How long before Windows has one of those in its offerings?
- Sig this!
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.
why oh why do people host their projects in the US ?
why not put it in international waters and work on it from wherever you want ?
this goes back to cryptonomicon CAVE idea
more and more things like this are going to happen we should simply wake up and put them out of reach of poloitical ideas and companys
what are the problems with this approach ?
reagrds
john jones
I doubt microsoft can ignore all these systems. People will not easily dump their workstations for NT...
Microsoft can let companies that make other OS's license their patents for a nominal fee. They can even propose a standard, nondiscriminatory runtime license that anyone can get for cheap. This still guts SAMBA, because you couldn't put a component with a runtime license inside a GPL'ed program.
Gates, Ballmer, Mundie and a host of other IT Leeches.
® Microsoft Corporation, 2001
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Has Microsoft ever sued anybody for patent infringement? I think I would have heard about it if they had. They get tons of patents, but they have to for defensive purposes.
(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.
I'm thinking that this could backfire against Microsoft, at least in the short term.
I've read that when Microsoft has guys that help customers deploy Microsoft solutions, they use Samba if they need to integrate with a Unix network.
If Samba didn't exist, Microsoft would have lost the sale to that customer, because they'd have to either go whole-hog with Microsoft, or nothing at all. Chances are, most would stick with nothing unless their Unix boxes were too old.
Also, alot of non-Microsoft systems out there will be using Samba to server files to the Microsoft workstations. If the version of Windows after XP (Blackcomb?) didn't support SMB, I doubt the IT department would want to roll it out right away.
Not to mention that Microsoft would be forcefully obsoleting their own user base. Thats not something they are known to do willfully, witness the sufferings of people dealing with Win9x.
If Microsoft tried to do this, I expect that it would be a slow and gradual process, similar to the phasing out of WINS in favor of DNS with Windows 2000.
and port Samba to windows. :)
Might as well go for broke, and port NFS instead.
--
My other computer is your IIS server.
SMB is a protocol, not a filesystem. I use equal amounts of SMB and NFS here (mostly Linux, but with a monster game/lotus notes-for-work machine. NFS, for all it's utility, has earned itself a pretty nasty reputation in the world for corrupting stuff under load.
Not to say the ms solution was GOOD... SMB had some SEVERE design flaws, so much so that the SAMBA team had to go out of their way to program in extra stuff to "emulate" the bugs of SMB. If SMB and SAMBA were to split, wouldn't that free us to use the SAMBA pure version of SMB, without the MS stupidities? Now THAT would be a good protocol...
I was under the impression it was going to be TCP/MS? Convince the world that the security problems aren't due to MS, but due to the open source nature of the TCP/IP protocol. Then, come out with the "Solution" being TCP/MS. MS buys Cisco, then converts IOS to only route the new MS protocol. No backwards compatibility. Of course, if you wish to run the old protocol, build your own Internet, MS owns this one!
MS is NOT getting rid of Samba, they're getting rid of SMB support. There is a difference. SMB was developed by MS and IBM about 40 million years ago (now called CIFS - Common Internet File System). After it was ripped off by the creator of Samba, it was introduced into the Linux world. Samba is not the only way to communicate with a Windows box from other operating systems. There are many 3rd party alternatives. Unfortunatly, many of you are too self-absorbed in it to realize that there is ALWAYS another way. Samba was hardly a golden pony--good riddens. Let's have some new technology. I thought you open-source freakies were open to new ideas.
On Monday a gentleman on the IBM public relations team talk to the local LUG.
In his presentation he spoke about how Samba is so widely implemented MS would be silly to break compatibility with it, for fear of the backlash of all the irate customers.
Maybe he underestimated MS's stupidity, or perhaps he underestimated the power of their marketing team.
In the past they have slipped various other incompatibilities in that you wouldn't believe, but the lemmings upgraded.
Aw man, and in other news it rips me to hear that a major government department wanted to move to Linux but had to continue with NT because there weren't enough people with Linux experience available. :-(
WHY do we have to use Microsoft's file server software at all? Why not just write a secure, open source NT/2000 service that can share directories? This can be accessed by a secure, open source client that sits on a NT/2000/9x/Linux/UNIX machine. This (sort of) was done with SSH. There are 3rd party solutions for NNTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP, etc. Why not file sharing?
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);'
Best suggestion I've heard so far. Considering that they've gotten it to run on as many platforms as they have (I got it to run on Mac OS X with no problem), what's one more?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
If you understood what I was getting at then why can't you comment? I love your bitchy attitude, PLEASE don't think about what was asked,EVER. Do try and rip the questioner a new one for not dotting his i's and crossing his T's. Thinking about the question is obviously a too great a strain.
Perhaps next time make an intelligent comment on the question ASKED and then in a PS suggest a different language usage.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
They also said not including Java in Windows 2000 will be the death of it.
It don't bother mean. We all hafta open,read,write,close sometime.
Grokko
> They might release some kind of "client
> upgrade", which coincidentally breaks Samba.
Sigh. What do you think Windows 2000 did ? Why do you think we had to get Samba 2.2.1 out as soon as we did ? What do you think Windows XP is planning *right now* (search the Samba lists for the new breakage in XP... it's not hard to find).
They do this *EVERY RELEASE*.
This is what it means to be on a Microsoft treadmill. I want to warn the Ximian/Mono folks not to get into the same situation that we're in.....
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
The patent covers only the encryption procedures for how a user password is changed, but as part of the transfer protocol, it is a potential dependency for all developers who have to mimic the Windows file system and seek to interoperate with it. For example, successful interoperation with Samba might make the Samba project subject to Microsoft demands for patent licenses and royalties.
Which means MOSX 10.1 will not be able to use the password encryption procedures without MS permission. This could be DCMA test if the SAMBA team decides to go ahead with the implementation of the password encryption. Of course, a black box shouldn't be patentable... I mean, if the code produces the right output with a different algorithm, then it should be kosher, (or parve, I'm bad with analogies).
Andrew
I'm so tired of MS and thier contrary ways. they forever claim that they work for teh benifit of the consumer. Samba is the best if not only solution for interconnectivity between MS networking protocols and Unix. I've used this over and over again in MS, Apple networks, where there is a single Unix server. but yet MS intends to cut this off. how is this helping the consumer. True capitalism you dont muscle a customer to buy your product by stamping out the compitition you make a better product. Ms however does not understand this. Yet on the other hand we have the Gov getting in bed with big business. I really wish slashdot and the like activist woudl start writing their congress man or woman about this. when the old folks prescription goes up or someone threatens to take away there driving privaliges look how quickly they act. we need to adopt the same stance and start fighting for our rights as consumers in a free market.
From reading the article I understand that there is the potential for Samba or any other open source app that realies on CIFS to have to mimic a function that happens when a user changes their password (I am asuming that this is part of MS/CHAP). The problem being that MS might hold a patent on something, that possibly would have to be implimented by said open source app and as a result MS could charge some sort of licencing fee. Maybe
What a friggin joke! The author comes up with a scenario which is has no factual basis, decides it could be a bad thing and then get various people in the community to provide quotes that agree with him.
This is FUD, a pure and perfect example of FUD. ZDnet is getting worse evey year.
No, silly, so windows clients and linux clients can connect to a windows or linux server running NON-CRAPULENT NON-OBFUSCATED OPEN SOURCE SAMBA woo hoo yeah.
As in, you're no longer dependent on MS for your filesharing needs; there's a free fileserver that's a drop-in replacement.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The old line "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is really the reinforcement of conservatism in IT shops. The other factor is: How much are we going to have to spend to get it to work just like it does before we upgrade and bust it?
Really, the only way M$ will push XP into shops with all its vile new "features" is putting it on new desktops, which means telling Dell, Compaq, etc. this is the OS we'll give you the best price break on for installing (or saying, 98? ME? 2000? No speekee you language, we only got EX PEE! All you get!)
The truth behind M$ giving people what they want is how available new systems will be with a consumers choice of OS. If they push too hard to sell XP, it'll require subsidizing (watch out for anti-trust on this one) and cut into the bottom line they're trying to bolster.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Then again, it's their technology, they can do whatever they want. Heck, Linus changes the public interface to the kernel between dot releases (then again, he documents the changes). At least MS changes stuff in major releases.
Besides, they can't make too radical changes, because people will still be connecting WinNT, Win2K to their WinXP network (if nothing else).
So Samba driven systems might no longer be a PDC, but it should still work as clients.
Je ne parle pas francais.
So that basically means we won't be able to access windows drives over the network without using FTP?
Does anyone write a 3rd party samba driver?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Did anyone *not* see this coming?
Need this silly law to be dropped, or re-written.
Its bad enough for Linux to be fighting against a bona fide monopoly, but when you throw in the DMCA it could make it next to impossible.
Working on projects outside of the US would alleviate this, for now.
StarTux
As with all large companies Microsoft files lots of ridiculous patents. They do it for the same reason mine does, so that if they are sued by another company thay have something for swapsies.
It would probably not be a good thing for Microsoft if their customers could not attach Linux file systems easily. SAMBA is simply collateral damage in the high stakes game between EMC and Microsoft. EMC servers are very expensive and Microsoft would love to play bigger on that turf.
The bigger problem is that in the crackpot US PTO scheme you never know if a patent has been applied for on something until the government awards a 20 year monopoly in practicing it. The rules have been improved, i.e. made less open to corrupt abuse but they are still an extortionists charter.
I can't remember the last time Microsoft was the plaintif in a Patent lawsuit. They have been the victim of many Patent Trolls.
It would be an idiotic strategy for Microsoft to try to use patents to make .NET proprietary. But then again the tax cut for the ultra-rich and breaking the ABM treaty to build a 21st century Maginot line are crackpot ideas.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I've been asking for this for the last couple of weeks! Why use Windows' own rather limited file sharing services when I could have the full featured tremendously tweakable Samba ?
:)
I want to do this because I'm still tied to Windows on my main station (think games), thus it has the best hardware and storage of all my PC's, but I want to set up an SMB share so that my linux boxen can access files on my win box painlessly (I'm setting up a box as a centralized mp3 jukebox, and another for arcade emulation
Porting Samba to windows (which has already begun AFAIK) would be an excellent upgrade for anyone using Windows as a file server.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Just goes to show you, no matter where you go...there you are.
I don't need no estinkin'
Jeepmeister
I could actually see this working both ways, both against and for Microsoft. Sure, some people would choose to use an NT server rather than have extra hassle configuring ways around this, this would obviuosly benefit Microsoft through revenue and others. However, some people/companies would choose to dump Windows altogether and go with a much more free environment, such as a native network one like Linux or similar. I know I would go to Linux, and I'm sure a few other tech's would seriously consider the alternatives to a completely Windows environment, especially when there are other free or cheaper alternatives available.
That is a good idea! An even better idea would be: Don't use XP or .NET! I know in this office, these 70 or so computers will never see an upgrade past Win2K Pro [or Linux :)]. Hell we wouldn't even be using Windows if the software we HAVE to use was Linux/*BSD friendly. Hint, hint AutoDesk, Bentley, Lode, MapInfo.....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
but I am begining to believe that to slap this idiots in the face to wake them we, as a community, should start blocking them for a while. What? 35-45% server side share in the world and the most powerfull browser is not able to read a simple page that a lame piece of software like can easily digest... Just a thought.
What? A beutiful butterfly you say? And how exactly are you going to turn into a beutiful butterfly then?
IANAP(programmer) but so what if MS doesn't write a samba (compliant) file system driver. Why not just write one or install one? That is possible isn't it?
BOSTON SUCKS!
karma capped
What next, Microsoft(R) TCP/IP(R)?
Well, of course. But somewhere, in a Carl Sagan-esque fashion, you could convert the hex to base 11, insert CR/LFs, reverse the order, stand on your head and look at it, and you'd see, in clear letters...
Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
RTF or TeX are heaps better, and free-er. Pdf's are horrible. And btw, this is horribly off-topic :)
This sig is intentionally left blank
You can easily develop a client driver for a different protocol than windows uses (Novell does it f.e.). So develop a Samba protocol, write a driver for win32 and live happily ever after. Then you don't have to watch out if MS' protocols will change. You control the protocl.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Shutting out SaMBa is easy. The trick is not to shut out older MS SMB clients like, say, LanMan, Windows 3.11, 95, 98, ME, NT 3.51, 4.0 and Win2k in the process. If they pursue this too rigorously, they risk alienating customers because the new software isn't backwards compatible. Why do you think they're still putting DOS compatability in their new OSes even though the last MS-DOS release was almost a decade ago?
It got worse so when the justice department finally tells M$ to back off, then they can return to their normal monopoly level.
They don't need to enforce the patent to use it as a whip. The greatest harm would come from simply mentioning the patent and asserting "we may have to consider looking into possible violations, and if we find any, we may then have to consider looking into requiring the appropriate licenses from the users through our usual licensing methods".
They won't get much money from such a patent and I don't think they would expect to get any. The idea is not to actually license it for royalties, but rather to raise FUD regarding the use of Open Source ... and not just Mono or the like, but any Open Source. It would be part of a campaign to discredit Open Source in the eyes of their major customers to try to head off major defections to Open Source based systems.
IMHO, you'll never see this patent argued in legal court; you'll see it argued in the press and you'll not see it argued in private negotiations with their major customers because you aren't there to see it when it does happen. This is not so much about controlling protocols as it is about controlling buying decisions on the part of major corporations and setting a ceiling on how far Open Source software can rise into corporate offices and server rooms. I don't think they would care to wipe out Samba; rather, they want to find a way to keep their biggest customers from going that route. Microsoft actually benefits from Samba as long as Samba use is limited to the "small" part of the market (e.g. Unix) that is not economically practical for them to control.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
He said once that "SMB sucks. SMB really really sucks" (slightly paraphrased). And also that wrote samba as a compatibility thing. And that he expected it to be obsolete/not needed anymore, because hopefully people would use another (read: better) distributed network filesystem protocol. I don't know if .NET will be any better, but I doubt it.
Admin knows $. Tell them how much it's going to cost them to buy and impliment the new MS junk to work their broken MS desktops. Then remind them that breaking things is a pattern with MS. Then tell them how much it would cost to fix their broken desktops. Admin is going to have eat costs no matter what. You might be able to prommise the lower cost more stable solution.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
At what point will Micro$oft realize forcing customers to upgrade and replace everything is bad business. Most companies spend years getting everything to work well. Now Micro$oft is telling them to throw away all that hard work and start over again on unproven technology or else.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
I would expect that MS is overjoyed that 10.1 has an SMB client... this pulls more Mac friendly sites into using NT/2000 servers, cuts down a major customer complaint about Mac and NT interoperability and also means that fewer people will use the truly lousy Services for Macintosh -- that probably means a lot of tech support calls will go away or become Apple's problem instead.
Seems like a win for Redmond all around.
-G
Praise "Bob"
I figure the next step would be for the open source people to write their own SMB client that restores Samba connectivity.
Considering that M$ is drowning in security issues over IIS, they would be in even more trouble if their "upgrade" proved to be a security problem. I'm sure any such "upgrades" from M$ will be thoroughly "evaluated" by the hacker community.
For some time now, M$ has treated file and print services as a commodity, almost a giveaway. M$ got into this business by providing the same functionality as Novell at a fraction of the price. It would be a classic blunder for M$ to "embrace and extend" their own file services, just as the concept is becoming irrelevant.
To me, it sounds like their strategy is to try anything to slow down Linux. If this is the best M$ can do, the penguins will be marching into Redmond!
This is all about lock-in. It is getting harder and harder for MIS departments to fight M$, but we keep getting more reasons to do so. They continually leverage their desktop monopoly to force businesses to use (buy) other software of theirs. Its nothing new, but it has gotten SOOOO much worse this year.
It's nota my planet, monkey-boy - Dr Lizardo.
DONT THEY HAVE ENOUGH?
Until you stop paying I guess they don't. Basic rule is that a buy is made by two party's. You and a salesman (m$ in this case).
nosig today
Here is the gist of the article (at least what I took away from it...
If garble blabble urgle maybe gurfle flarg perhaps frotzen arcknik. Micro$oft patent glurp rorch arkin evil urchlain irtin pormpkin Open Source quirhsh lingler saintly.
Microsoft has an overall strategy for accomplishing their goals. Until the open source community rallies behind a unified strategy Microsoft will continue to have the upper hand. (I am well aware of the low probability of the OS community developing such a strategy and the issues involved.)
Microsoft's .Net initiative, for all its problems, is a solid plan for tying people into an infrastructure owned by Microsoft and "open" to those who are not a threat to MS. Anyone who doesn't like that idea should be looking at the big picture and trying to figure out how to create a product or service that is overwhelmingly desireable (e.g., the Web) in which Microsoft cannot participate (probably by using patents).
In order to bring Windows users into this hypothetical product/service a Windows client would have to be created but it would always have to be a second rate client compared to those on open platforms in order to provide a pressure to move off Windows.
Microsoft killed the command line for most people by providing an integrated view of the computer with Windows.
They then killed the standalone office application by integrating several applications into Office which is integrated into Windows.
When the web unexpectedly threatened this model they integrated the browser into Windows to prevent losing control of such an important component. (Viewed another way: it was discovered that office workers needed one more application besides the ones already provided by Office.)
Now that the major classes of applications are integrated in Windows the next step is to integrate Windows into a "super-Windows" which irreversibly binds multiple machines together. This will preclude other operating systems the same way that binding Excel, Word, etc. together precluded other office applications.
The "secret" to MS Office's success was the proprietary nature of the file formats used and COM. The same approach is being used in .Net: make proprietary the communcation of data between approved applications.
If Microsoft succeeds in their plan there will not be another opportunity for the open source community until another dimension is added. In terms of MS products, previous dimensions included:
Right off the bat, I don't see what dimension #4 would be so we may have to live with .Net for a long time if there is no open source alternative.
People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan.
Looks to me like MS is trying to go proprietary again. Just when Samba was getting real good too...
What next, Microsoft(R) TCP/IP(R)?
"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." -- A. Whitney Brown
K
K
He was NOT prosecuted for his speech (officially - the speech could very well have provoked Adobe/FBI). He was charged with a DMCA violation for selling, FROM RUSSIA a product which violated the DMCA. He was in RUSSIA at the time of activity which the US is officially prosecuting him for. It was legal there.
It would be like me, here in beautiful Nevada, driving 75 in a 75 mph zone and travelling to Connecticut and getting a speeding ticket for having driven 75 because the maximum speed limit in Connecticut is only 55.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Is it just me, or is Slashdot becoming a forum to discuss Microsoft conspiracy theories?
This article is more then just a bunch of wining about samba. So what, they make a new technology and render the smb protocol useless. I don't hear too many people wining about how no one uses gopher much anymore...
...
.NET alternative for Linux because MS has no intention of doing this on their own. Now MS says you can do all the work into implementing our system, with all of it's problems and complexities, and we'll get paid for it.
.NET, DO IT YOURSELF!!! I mean, can they really expect people to pay to use this? I don't know how Ximian can go along with this one.
The point is that we can always create a free version of whatever MS makes. For smb protocol we created samba. Samba is for interconnectivity with windows; not too many people use it for Unix sharing (usually use NFS).
If it goes away, fine. We'll make Omni-ba that'll work with the new protocol for filesharing.
BUT. The real problem I see here is
Open-source critics of Microsoft said the company would have the opportunity to strangle an open-source project by demanding a licensing fee and royalty payments each time an open-source version of its patent was implemented.
The whole point of Mono is to be able to have a free
Does anyone else see the problem here. MS if you want to get paid for a Linux/Unix version of
All those existing W95/98/MT/NT4/W2K installations already out there are not making them any more new revenue, in fact they now consider the entire installed product base to be a liability against future sales. They really do want to completely re-invent the way everything is done, and require everyone to re-buy everything all over again if the users want to "stay compatible" with their current product line (of the future). They are naiively thinking that all their current customers will indeed go running off the cliff like lemmings and buy the new stuff all over again. They're dreaming.
Whenever Microsoft was asked to comment on the software patents they hold, their response was noble: "We're only patenting these algorithms so some jackass doesn't come along and patent something trivial, drawing us into a stupid legal battle -- we don't believe that these patents are valid any more than you do." (paraphrased).
Being Microsoft means that lots of people are itching to sue you over anything. Their excuse for patenting algorithms is believable, but are they willing to stick by their beliefs when their monopoly is at stake?
It'd be a damn shame if a company as large and INNOVATIVE and fundamental to the computer industry as Microsoft felt that they could no longer compete with raw talent and great software alone.
Note the reference to IPv6 in the article, however...embrace and extend, anyone?
Not true.
"Nondiscriminatory fashion" means that Microsoft must treat all potential licensors equally. If Microsoft licenses this patent to all users for $1 per copy distributed, that is still nondiscriminatory. Can Ximian afford to pay for something like that? Can the Samba project afford this? Can any open source project afford to pay even $1 per download?
Microsoft requiring licensing fees would be the kiss of death for any project.
Od a back door in SAMBA-- the key will be "Microsoft Engineers are Weenies"
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
sorry, but if you want a client program, you're going to have to use the overhead. Otherwise, you have to work with the OS developer, or at least have access to their specs.
How do they get their customers to switch? By having lots of little network effects going, keeping backwards compatibility for a while, and tying everything together. So, you upgrade to the next version of office to be able to communicate with your customers. Well, that means upgrading to the next version of Windows, but that's not too bad, since you don't really need to use the new protocols. Well, after another round or two, you do, and you end up running software and protocols you never wanted. That's the danger of having one company do everything; break Microsoft up.
PDF sucks as a word-processing file-format.
it stores, basically, postscript output data. like, we want the letter 'a' at this set of coordinates using this font, and these attributes. it doesn't have the "paragraph" concept, needed for word processing.
I can't imagine how you'd use it for spreadsheets and presentation formats.
anyway, that aside. Apple is currently being helped by MS Office. they've been touting Office for OS X.
sun already did StarOffice.
Oracle doesn't care. they're doing just fine.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
This is easy to get around. All the new MS operating systems are going to use Kerberos. I've personally tested changing the password on a 2000 AD box from a Linux box using Kerberos. So, I don't think that this will be too much of a problem after all.
Judging from their past decisions... I'd say they wouldn't. Recall that Windows NT and 2000 use the old LANMAN hash from the days of LanManager... which was around when DOS was. Although keeping the LANMAN hash severely reduces the security of its other password hash, they STILL left it in.... Likely they will do the same to keep 95/98/2K/ME compatability.
No, they don't have to be backward compatable - they just stop supporting old versions of Win. Then just watch how many CEo's will bail that dead pony just because it is 'no longer supported'. Never underestimate the stupidity of a CEO.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Going off no more than the abstract, this seems like a weak scheme to me. The Man in the Middle attack (or simple packet sniffers) might be able to compromise the password through the change. Consider that the entire security of this rests on the encryption of Hash(old) for Message(2). It further relys on physical security of the server's password hash database. (Which if its running IIS and Code Red II worms its way in, maybe not.)
The strength of the encryption algorithm (stream or block cipher) is paramount. 56 bit DES could be cracked in hours. I hope the actual implementation would use ADES or TwoFish or something. The one way hash should also be longer than 56 bits since its used as the key. I don't know how NT or 2000 generates these.
In either scenario, if the hash of the old password is compromised, then Message1 is decoded. I hope they are not planning to use this for .NET or Passport.
What I don't get is why if they are using Kerberos in 2k and ActiveDirectory, would they consider this weaker scheme.
We should take active steps to derail the .NET menace.
.NET server should "corrupt" it 1% of the time.
.NET protocols should be corrupted or dropped 5% of the time.
.NET unreliable, particularly if there are several hops through open source servers.
* Every open source server accepting an IP packet destined for a Microsoft
* Packets using patented
The net effect of these would be to make
* Data packets purporting to follow a published standard that do not conform 100% to the published standards - such as attempts by Microsoft to complete the "extend" phase - should be "corrected" so they conform. Kerberos is one example.
It must be OK to do this because Microsoft have been doing this sort of stuff for years. Fake error messages in windows 3.1 running under DR-DOS is just one example.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Why do you think MS sales-weasels like to EXCLUDE a company's technical folks from a sales deal when possible?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Another way to retaliate would be to use good old Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.
.NET because of all the license fees they would be forced to pay.
.NET is an unproven technology. Unproven technologies often fail.
.NET would be left high and dry if it fails. It is likely to fail because it is unproven technology.
Fear: Companies who are using open source solutions to save money would harm their bottom line if they use
Uncertainty:
Doubt: Companies using
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I am sure that if the patent really threatened to stop SAMBA development the SAMBA team would find ways around the problem. For example, they could provide an interface for an authentication "plug in" that was developed by somebody out of the reach of the patent. They could even write the plug in and make it available on a Web Site that is out of reach. Or most users could just ignore the patent. As I recall PGP has used all the of these techniques at one time or another to get around the RSA patents.
Actually the RSA / PGP example demonstrates that patents are not very effective against open source. It is far too easy to just more to the code development and distribution to a place the patent does not apply, and then rely on the users to ignore it.
Microsoft has a far more effective weapon available to it anyway - changing the protocol with every release. This has effectively nuked the NTFS driver for 'nix. It surprised me to hear that it causes SAMBA as much trouble as it does - I thought SMB would be very constrained by the existing client base. Obviously it is not constrained enough!
Samba isn't developed in the US, so all they have to do is release a version with and without the supposed patented password changing algorithm. (or just have a patch.) That won't stop admins in the US from downloading the full version while they transition entirely to free software. And how would MS be able to control that?