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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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The humor is intentional I assure you. Glad you enjoy it as much as I.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
> 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
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
> 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
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."
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 $X in patent licensing fees from 'free software'?"
So now instead of you being able to thumb your nose at the BSA because you use Open Source, they'll be gunning for your Samba installation.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Actually, that depends on install base of all products on the market.
If M$ 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
> 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"
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.
[
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.
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.
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.
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
That's funny. We get absolutely no support from MS for our older operating systems. We pay a lot of money to them for support too. The business market is the one they most want to force to upgrade.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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
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
and since you think you were joking about MS replacing TCP/IP, read someone else's thoughts on the subject: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802. html
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
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
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.
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);'
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 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.
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.
Did anyone *not* see this coming?
Maybe not. In Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., the Federal Court of Appeals curtailed the strength of the Doctrine of Equivalents (it's currently on appeal to the Supreme Court). IANAL, and I'm not about to wade through the text of the decision, so I can't say anything intelligent about the kind of limits they imposed, but I thought you might be interested.
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 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.
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
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?
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.
First off, the IBM PC was introduced in1981. Kind of embarassing to be off by 100% on recent history.(about the same as saying that World War II took place in 1880).
More importantly, if reverse engineering had been illegal when the IBM PC came out, "IBM PC Compatible" would never have become the standard and we'd be using some derivative of CP/M.
Huh, didn't think of that one, right?
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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
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