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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?
Regardless of whether what you suggest would or would not be legal, it isn't necessary. As the article points out, the document is obsolete and the methods it describes are not even in use by Microsoft anymore. Besides, they are inappropriate for a Posix/Unix implementation, so alternative methods have been in use for some time anyway.
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...
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 . . .
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?
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/
As James Bond said once, "How do you kill a few hours in Rio, if you don't samba?"
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Click here or here.
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?
Your thoughts could be answered with a simple google search.
;)
http://main.mswinxp.net/~lpackham/smbclient/
Of course, it requires Cygwin. But, a drop in replacement for something that is proprietary to begin with and comes bundled with all windows version sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn't it.
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"
I found the other news link for today on the Samba home page even more interesting. Could this be the motivation behind the strange licensing hijinx?
...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!
By using the original document as input for your document, you are creating a derivative work of it, and you must therefore obey the license you "obtained" the document under.
You would therefore have no right to issue such a derivative work under the GPL, and you, and anyone who built on your work (and so on down) would have their asses sued off by MS until they stopped.
Of course you might say "but how would they know I copied/adapted/altered their work" - but thats a different question. If you based your work on theirs you have to obey their rules.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as 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.
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.
If I can't, I hate to say it, but I may be forced to switch my network storage box to some Windows variant.
Wrong answer. I am not obsoleting my entire system because a user adds a new incompatible box. I insist the new stuff is compatible with my LAN. I have the incompatible new box user find and install the drivers needed to access the system. If it can't do SMB and TCP/IP, it's incompatible.
The truth shall set you free!
- 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.Firstly MS RPC is not "on top of" DCE RPC. It is an implementation of DCE RPC. Secondly if you make an RPC call, it can go over a variety of transports -- one of the great things about DCE RPC. Most windows boxes from NT4.0 onwards are configured to use IP by default.
Some more errors:
- RAP is not a layer in the stack for most of what you describe, only for the actual RAP functions, such as NetShareEnum. Most operations (such as open/read/lock) don't use it at all.
- Named Pipes are not "on top of" transactions. Transactions are an option for Named Pipes.
- Named pipes aren't on top of SMB. They are one of the things you can open using SMB, i.e. a type of file in a special part of the filesystem. The analogy is with character or block fifos in unix.
I might as well say:If you reduced it all down to copper wires imagine how efficient it could be! All you'd need is different voltages! Just code your application to read directly from an ADC!
NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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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