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Samba Team Responds to Microsoft CIFS Spec License

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the jeremey-reads-slashdot-at-minus-one dept.

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.

8 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Samba/MS by neksys · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  2. It is interesting... by DaedalusLogic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  3. Hmm... by Khaed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Hmm... by sasha328 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In this case, there was nothing new, so says the SAMABA people. But what would happens when (notice I didn't say if) MS changes the specs significantly to break the surrent implementation of SAMBA, but before doing this, they release the specs with similar restrictions to what they've just done) That is, no GPLed products? Where would the SAMBA teams stand when they upgrade their implementation?
      * MS to Judge (in case of MS vs SAMBA): Sorry your honour, but they couldn't possibly have reverse engineered the new implementation; they must've used the published specs. This, your honour, violated the (some acronym) law.
      Seems far fetched? I hope so.

  4. Testing Waters by Bouncings · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/
  5. Re:I'd like to see this in court by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    Microsoft would love this development; it would prevent them from having to do the dirty work themselves. Windows doesn't depend on interoperability with GNU stuff quite as much as GNU depends on interoperability with Windows.

  6. Re:For the sake of interoperability by coene · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Don't implement windows in SAMBA. by Fuzzums · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.