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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.
Is Samba available for Win32 platforms?
I know this sounds like a strange question, but consider: Microsoft's SMB-based file sharing system is buggy and insecure. Could Samba be used as a drop-in replacement for regular Windows file sharing?
E.G.: you don't like Windows file sharing. So, you turn it off and install Samba instead. It works the same -- you wind up with shared folders that appear on the network -- but the sharing is being handled by Samba instead of the vanilla Win32 file sharing.
Is that possible? Maybe I'm suffering from hallucinations induced by too much Mountain Dew . . .
I have a crazy idea. Since Samba is probably used by many Microsoft-oriented shops too, why can't the Samba Team embrace and extend the CIFS protocol? This would be a two pronged attack. One of the prongs would be the Samba Team which will extend the CIFS protocol and publish it under the GPL. The other prong will be a group that will write win32 applications that will take advantage of the Samba extensions to the CIFS and distribute the app for free. Since the OSS community numbers in the thousands at least, this would be very straightforward to accomplish.
I wonder what Microsoft will do if the Samba extensions to the CIFS become a de-facto standard? When is the next iteration of Windows anyway? Right now could be a window of opportunity just opening up.
Sigh, I know I'm day dreaming. But, wouldn't it be nice to give MS a dose of its own medicine?
Or worse, what if the Windows EULA was changed to explictly forbid running it in an emulated virtual machine? That would kill VirtualPC, VMware, and plex86 all with one fell swoop -- and drive a lot of users back to the Windows platform.
You've got a good point. Hopefully, if enough people become aware of the dangerous possibilities of this kind of faux-open documentation licensing, the antitrust people will be able to do something about it.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
I hope this is a horror scenario, but happenings similar this are already documented history:
;))
when and if Samba raises to compete as the file/printer sharing protocol to be installed on Microsoft products instead of Microsoft products, they will just start using client certificates or something to criple Samba access to other MSFT shares. I quess cross-compatibility is not bad enough for MSFT to take action, but dare you replace their perfect piece of software with some GPL crap and you are in trouble.
I do believe this is a scenario which could happen, maybe the court case changes something and the future is different, but until then they have strong artillery left to "defend the shares"
...SMB will have to go away.
Micro$haft is the main company working on Windows networking protocols, and as has always been the case they don't seem to encourage standards or interoperability.
I'm thinking a better solution would be to use OpenAFS. It works on Windows and Linux just fine, and its not going to have interoperability problems because all of the stuff is open source.
I believe its only a short time, maybe a year or four, before M$ doesn't have anything to do with network interoperability software, unless they change their policy.
A saying comes to mind:
"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Blockquoth the responder:
Heh.
Tell that to the Mozilla team, or anybody who's worked on a win32 web browser in the last few years. Internet Explorer is proprietary, comes bundled with all windows versions . . . and it's got a big, red bulls-eye in the middle that all the other browsers are aiming for.
Thanks for the info on the Cygwin Samba client. I actually did do a couple of Google searches before posting, but evidently I didn't pick the magic words.
I have a crazy idea. Since Samba is probably used by many Microsoft-oriented shops too, why can't the Samba Team embrace and extend the CIFS protocol? This would be a two pronged attack. One of the prongs would be the Samba Team which will extend the CIFS protocol and publish it under the GPL. The other prong will be a group that will write win32 applications that will take advantage of the Samba extensions to the CIFS and distribute the app for free. Since the OSS community numbers in the thousands at least, this would be very straightforward to accomplish.
This would work so long as there was a compelling advantage (i.e. - lots faster file transfers). There's no point adding extensions just for the hell of it - they have to do something that users want done. Personally I'd like to see SSL support built into SMB, and adding that to the Samba implementation with a seamless Win32 client would be enough for me to switch all the Windows boxen I use to the Samba implementation.
Neat work, MS.
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. You can't choose just two out of the three, they come co-mingled.
- MS/RPC on top of
- DCE/RPC and
- Remote Access Protocol (RAP) over
- Named Pipes on top of
- Transactions on top of
- Server Message Block (SMB) on top of
- NetBIOS
If you do an RPC call it goes through all of that (minus RAP which is quite dead post NT). A redesign would be trivial to implement by comparison because you could reduce all of that crap to one uniform API.Then MS is even more brain dead than I thought.
I have never seen a case where a printer cannot be shared over the network under UNIX. The printer driver layer and the network printing layer are separated. I always thought it was the same under MS, so every printer could be shared. Then again, I don't use MS as a print server.
Perhaps a tax on amateur lawyers on slashdot would close the WBush budget deficit and help save social security.
IANAL but I know the basics of copyright law having spent time trying to stop people extending them. Copyright has no connection to trade secret law as you imply. In fact under European law copyright is a bargain, you get copyright protection in return for disclosure. In the US that bargain aspect has largely been erased as the doctrine of intellectual property as intrinsic right developed.
The point about the phone book is that copyright is meant to protect only the representation of the idea, not the idea itself. In the case of a phone book the representation is so lacking in creativity - alphabetical order, that there is only an idea.
The Microsoft 'license' is not something I would want to spend money attempting to enforce. The information in the document is clearly not a trade secret, bars on redistribution of ideas are unlikely to work in a US court. Copyright doctrine even in the US is not favorable.
What the license does do however is to make it clear that anyone developing a samba type implementation knows that there is a patent on the implementation.
The license also makes it impossible for someone to claim that they have acquired any rights as a result of a GPL license. While folk on slashdot try to claim otherwise the explicit purpose of RMS's scheme was to make it impossible to sell software. You might think RMS is with you but whatever RedHat and co say, RMS turned down offers to join their advisory boards because their business is contrary to his 'principles'. What this comes down to is that Gates understands what RMS is really up to better than most slashdotters.
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