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Samba Team Responds to Microsoft CIFS Spec License
Jeremy Allison - Samba Team writes: "The Samba Team has released a statement regarding the Microsoft CIFS specification license and its effect on Samba. Regards! Jeremy Allison" Reading this and the Microsoft CIFS Technical License raises a number of issues worth considering. The statement maintains that the specification details an old implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol, one Microsoft itself has abandoned. One wonders if the only reason they release such docs are as props for a court case or something.
As much as I like and support the Samba team, I think they're going to end up fighting a losing battle here - Microsoft won't give up its stranglehold on any facet of its operating system. And while in the old days, the would have just purchased the entire Samba project, now they have little choice but to try these sneaky strongarm tactics. After all these months/years of bashing the GPL and OSS in general, Microsoft can't just absorb and accept Samba - especially not in front of the courts.
A thought: How many snippets of Samba code do you think has found its way into, say, Windows 2000?
To think about what kind of a paradox would be arise when complex licenses overlap. I think a valid point was brought up in why not make alternate documentation that wouldn't refer to the original license... I would think it would put all the liability on the head of someone who wrote the new docs... Personally I wish they could sort it down to plane English and short sentences. Kinda like the ten commandments for users. But someone has to feed all the starving lawyers I guess... lol. Sadly it does come down to how much political pressure and money you can throw at enforcing a license that makes it stand up...
Uh, so it's a non-issue?
That's kind of what I thought when I first heard about this.
"Microsoft...documented basically what Samba already knows...and doesn't want people to...use the documentation for GNU purposes...Ok...what about what they already have? Oh, not affected? Ok."
Looks to me like Microsoft just got these reactions: Loving fanboy support(all three of them), people who could care less(most people), people who went into an idiotic rage(a lot, but not a majority), and people who scratched there heads and asked, "So?"(more than the first, less than the other catagories.)
I mean, basically all they did was brass off some of the geek community and make themselves look, well, dumb. No one really cares about their documentation...do they?
Seriously though, if this isn't a show of how much of a monopoly they are, I don't know what is. Next thing you know, they'll force MS-TCP/IP out, and have a similar agreement saying that anything not under their license is not permitted.
How would Microsoft react if suddenly the open-source community decided that anything under the GNU could not inter-operate with microsoft products? I think MS would flip out kill whole town.
Although this particularly license has no real implications, and I think we can be sure Microsoft is aware of this, perhaps their is a more sinister goal here: testing the waters of anti-GPL and/or anti-free-software licenses.
What would happen, for example, if Windows were "licensed" to exclude its use in conjunction with certain free software -- such as -- oh say -- Wine. Wine works better with Windows binary libraries accessible, and Microsoft might be thinking about some kind of anti-free-software clause in the Windows license.
I suspect this obsolete Samba license is just a beta test of their newest scam.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Open Source software does not automatically "play better with friends". SMB is an extreme case where higher-level features of the protocol get constantly added/modified/removed by a proprietary vendor (MS). It's hard to manage (and the Samba team has done an excellent job with this).
SMB will not go away, much in the same way NFS wont. Its the cornerstone of Microsoft based file/print/resource sharing.
Market share trumph's evolution.
Market share trumph's innovation.
Ok, I know I'm not supposed to feed the troll. But here goes:
If Linus *could* do that, that is licence for example 2.4.21 under a non-GPL license, anyone is free to take for example 2.4.20 and continue development with GPL. Linus could make his own, proprietary implementation, but 2.4.20 and it's GPL successors would still be GPL, and Linus' proprietary kernel would soon be irrelevant. I don't think the kernel is as dependent upon Linus as it once was, there's plenty of people who knows as much about each specific part of the kernel as Linus does.
This is *exactly* one of the benefits of open source, and an argument the proprietary/closed source software business had better NOT try to press, because the problem is much worse with closed source software. What if MS decided that they didn't want to develop Microsoft SQL server OR provide security fixes anymore? What if they decided that they for example didn't like a specific business, and decided to alter the license so that that business was no longer allowed to use MS SQL server?
Well said. I was involved in a project that implemented the CIFS/SMB protocol in an Apple product. The specification is a moving target. For instance, Microsoft's version of the spec stated that a particular field of an SMB call must contain zero and nothing else. The call would fail consistently in our product. A smart engineer, some test tools and a sniffer soon revealed the problem: Microsoft used that field to carry the length of the data used in the call.
If Microsoft were the best engineers and competed on that basis, my view of them would be different. But they see no problem in crippling or co-opting other protocols and standards if it serves their purposes (i.e. "Cha-ching, Jocko!"). Navigator, QuickTime, Java, and CIFS/SMB are hallmarks of how Microsoft leverages its monopoly power and why the court's remedy must give the industry some recourse.
Turn it around. Implement SAMBA in windows.
My FTP-client is integrated in windows, so why don't they make a SAMBA-plugin for windows.
Don't bow for windows and accept everything they invent.
This way you can get maximum compatibility between M$ and Linux without nasty M$ licences.
Privacy is terrorism.