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.""

Comments

Re:just remember...

[rpozz]

Ermm.. nobody has agreed to it yet, it's just what MS proposed. Remember that there are companies like SUSE in Europe.

Re:Competitor

[HermanAB]

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...

Re:I don't understand...

[poopdeville]

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.