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.

Comments

Samba/MS

[neksys]

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?

Hmm...

[Khaed]

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?

Testing Waters

[Bouncings]

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.