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Microsoft's Slap at Samba
Rollie Hawk writes "Microsoft's latest attempt to reconcile with the European Commission's antitrust rulings against the company may result in another victim. It seems their offer, if accepted, will strike a considerable blow at a leading competitor in the realm of file and printer sharing.
The popular open source suite Samba stands to be the recipient of a backhanded slap from Redmond if the offer stands and the European branch of the Free Software Foundation is taking it personally. Though Microsoft is offering to make some information regarding interoperability available to competitors, it's only under the condition that implementations are not open source. According to FSFE president Georg Greve, "the proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a free software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software."
How is Samba being specifically targeted? Greve argues this is because "Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market.""
Ermm.. nobody has agreed to it yet, it's just what MS proposed. Remember that there are companies like SUSE in Europe.
It isn't a copy of MS technology. It is a copy of DEC and IBM technology, with a few mods so it will also work properly with MS technology...
Oh well, what the hell...
People have incorrectly assumed that Samba must implement the methods described in these patents. In fact, the methods described in these patents are quite inappropriate for a Unix/POSIX CIFS implementation such as Samba. It would not even be possible to implement the methods described in these patents in a portable POSIX application. Instead, Samba treats the SMBreadbraw and SMBwritebraw protocol elements in the same way as all other elements of the CIFS/SMB protocol. This means that Samba should be completely unaffected by the existence of these patents. Microsoft claims that Samba is infringing anyway.
After all, I am strangely colored.
[i] Why a commercial company should be forced to dismantle and hand itself over to open source.[/i]
It isn't being ordered to do that. MS is a monopoly. Not necessarely illegal, but hurts the consumers just the same. In order to mitigate that unnecessary damage, monopolies are usually regulated.
In this case, the EU doesn't want this company, especially since it is foreign, to hinder any competition in the market. MS does that, or has the power to do that, very well with its control over proprietary protocols and desktop dominance. The EU wants to dismantle this control to create an even playing field, so that anyone (including open source) can implement their own tools to use those communication channels as well as MS. The hope is that the market will foster more competition and thus benefit the consumer.
They aren't ordering MS to turn over all its code and copyrights. Just the way they setup (not implemented) certain communication components.
Of course with Politics out and above swinging maddly, they probably shot a bit high. They learned from our DOJ, if you shoot at the target, MS will nudge it just enough to miss. The EU is shooting really high and hoping after all the delays, back and forth mumbling, and what not, the arrow will at the least hit the edge of the target.
Assuming that the developers of the closed binaries were not interested in supporting multiple architectures. My vision is that they would a private volunteer org that supports the SAMBA project... the developers would be slected from those developing samba now, and would be restricted to contributing to the closed source portion to prevent the OSS tools from being comprimised by their knowlege of the MS protocols.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Breakfast served all day!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Except that the EU has already said that the MS proposal is acceptable, and they are proceding to "market test" it. If people want to beat MS on this, they need to make sure those market tests fail.
Wise men learn more from fools than fools learn from the wise.
Microsoft themselves offer an NFS client and server as part of their "Services for Unix" download.
http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine .html
I guess the world owes him a living. Notice the date on it.
C|N>K
Very interesting artical. It also says that the IDL descriptions would be extreemly useful. If Microsoft was only concerned about sharing the source code then they would be happy to give these so called IDL descriptions.
"There is information that the Samba developers want to see: the IDL descriptions for remote procedure calls. These underpin tasks such as adding users, and adding quotas and shares, and Samba developers have successfully decoded them over the wire. But it's hard work.
"These IDL descriptions are *key* for providing interoperability with Microsoft clients," wrote the team in a submission to the EU commissioners earlier this year. "If these IDL descriptions were published, open and equal interoperability with Microsoft products would be greatly enhanced (although still not perfect)."
Allison says the Samba team has requested the IDL definitions from Microsoft annually, most recently at the 2001 CIFS conference, without success."