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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.""
You have to admire Microsoft's ability to turn what seems to be a damaging situation into something that might actually benefit them!
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
"When you have dinner with the devil, make sure you have a long spoon".
If anybody at the EU Commission is still in love with Microsoft, that should wake them up. I hope.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Can someone explain to me how Microsoft sees itself in the position to make demands? They've been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and have been sanctioned accordingly. "Your honor, I offer to go to prison if I get 24/7 internet access, a laptop and a PS3." I'd be the laughing stock of the judicial system.
the European politicians asked European computer industry representatives for whether this was a good solution. And since most of them have just as much stake in closed, proprietary solutions as Microsoft, they all nodded in agreement.
Microsoft loves this because they know they can kill any commercial competitor they like through either FUD or just buying them; they just haven't figured out how to kill competition from FOSS.
FOSS advocates need to be vocal and clear that this is not an acceptable solution and that it will hurt competition and that it will hurt the economy.
I thought people/companies were free (as in speech!) to release their code under whatever license terms they wish. Does "free as in Free Software" actually mean "whatever the FSF deems acceptable"?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Look, Bill, let me explain something to you. The purpose of a government is to protect people from forces that are more powerful than themselves and which will harm them. Gangs. Nuclear terrorists. Wildfires. One of those things is monopolies: companies that have a stranglehold on a necessary commodity. We have laws that prohibit companies that hold a monopoly from behaving in certain ways. Preventing interoperability with competing products in a universal network is one such behavior. If MS had 50% of the market, SAMBA wouldn't have a case. But they have more than 90% - a technical monopoly.
If you have trouble with the big words, ask Melissa to explain them to you.
That you are going to really hear it now?
You somewhat have a point, but it overlooks the purpose of a corporation. The State of Washinton gave Microsoft a corporate charter, with the idea that they would produce something of value and perform a service for the state (ie: its citizens). Let's ignore the fact that this is an overseas matter for now.
To say that we should protect corporations from losses due to alternative products would be disasterous. We are supposed to demand that Microsoft works in our best interest (as long as they have that charter) and we are not supposed to think of theirs. I know this isn't how things are; but how there were and how they should be.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Simple: Microsoft has clearly established and abused a monopoly and there is no efficient market for the type of software sold by Microsoft.
Governments in a capitalist society have a duty to ensure efficient markets in those areas that are not natural monopolies (and to ensure natural monopolies are not abused).
Think of this as punishment for Microsoft's past abuses of its monopoly if you will, or think of it as governments acting to regulate companies that operate in a manner that is detrimental to a free market and hence to their citizens.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's not like Samba could be commercially harmed by Microsoft's actions.
Oh SURE they can! They can simply sue Samba devs for "using our specifications illegally as stated in blahblahblah".
The samba devs would have to prove that they did NOT in fact read the specs. Frankly I don't know how this is different from software patents.
once this data is out there it will become much harder [impossible?] for the samba team to say they reverse-engineered the protocols as opposed to receiving the information from a licensee in violation of ms' rules...
then samba is considered tainted and is open to injunction against distribution.
just my dos centavos.
sum.zero
This is a bunch of bullcrap. The Samba team did not have that information available. In fact, the protocols and codes were reverse-engineered to obtain interoperability.
But let's say, for just a minute, that Microsoft somehow wants to pull Samba into this ridiculous web of deceit. Nobody said that this has been approved already. And if enough people raise hell at the EU, this will be turned down. Besides, when someone points out that the EU undoubtedly uses Samba in possibly thousands of EU government computers (at various levels in government), this will get turned down extremely quickly.
Microsoft can continue to turn defeats into stunning victories, but the tighter they close their fists, the more computers slip through their fingers. And there will be a day when no computer in the world runs anything with the name Microsoft on it. I guarantee it. Many empires that were bigger and more powerful than Microsoft are now but a footnote in a history book. Where is the Roman empire? I don't care if it lasted a thousand years before it fell. Microsoft will not be so lucky, especially as they piss off increasing numbers of individuals, companies, and even governments with their business practices, prices, and defective products. And even if Samba is somehow supposed to be banned from the EU, there are billions of people all over the world, and thousands of Samba programmers who live outside the EU, and rest assured they will continue to use and develop it anyway.
Asking to allow competition with all but its main competitor.
What is all this about? Isn't it about allowing competition?
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
It's down to Microsoft's good grace that it still exists at all.
From what I understand, Samba was created through reverse engineering, and the main reason MS hasn't sued is because basically, they can't - it's a product designed solely for interoperability, and any case would (hopefully) be thrown out.
Why a commercial company should be forced to dismantle and hand itself over to open source.
Hullo? The monopolist is not being asked to hand over any code. They are being asked to simply provide the information neccessary for competitors to inter-operate with microsoft windows.
Please explain how that amounts to microsoft "dismantling itself"
> Why a commercial company should be forced to dismantle and hand itself over to open source.
Dismantle? Dismantle?? What kind of drugs are you on? Providing documentation is not the same as being dismantled! And as for why, well, you might as well ask why a private citizen has to go to jail. It's because they were convicted of a crime and are being punished. I mean, duh!
> It's not like Samba could be commercially harmed by Microsoft's actions.
Geeze, even for slashdot, this is a silly comment. Hasn't the "free speech, not free beer" quote been posted about a million times? Of course Samba can be commercially harmed by Microsoft's actions! Vendors like IBM, HP, Sun, Red Hat, Novell, and yes, even SCO sell Samba. Just because none of them have exclusive rights to the code does not mean it's not a commercial product! Locking out Samba harms dozens, maybe thousands, of companies, as well as consumers, for the private benefit of just one company. That is the definition of antitrust.
HTH, HAND
Samba itself can only be harmed if Microsoft uses this declaration as a wedge to enforce what it sees as its rights to a proprietary protocol (that they (a) didn't originally create, and (b) published a couple of RFCs about).
But... Sun and IBM and RedHat and HP and Novell, who all use the Samba server in their OS offerings to compete with Microsoft, will definitely be harmed by this decision if it stands.
As to why a monopolist aggressor should be forced to dismantle itself, a corporation is an artificial entity created to serve the needs of the citizens; in relatively recent times, a corporation is a demi-person. If we can inflict significant penalties (most of a person's life) for crimes, what is irrational about forcing a monopolist to disclose protocol documentation?
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
**slaps head** The yoda misquote aside...
big business should be protected from open source because it wipes out their profits without any commercial gain and impacts taxable income!
Like IBM, Redhat, and dozens of other businesses out there right? Oh, those don't count? Even for businesses that don't have a direct stake in OSS, there's a huge capital advantage because it allows businesses to shift capital away from non-core expenses. ie. they're not wasting money on software. Thus businesses as a whole are strengthened becuase of OSS. Only the relatively few boxed software companies will feel the pinch. The rest do better.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Closed binaries from a single source would make it much more difficult to port Samba to new architectures. x86 users would be just fine, but anybody that wanted to run Samba on, say, a Cell Processor running Linux would be forced to wait for the "non-oss company" to support it.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
It's funny how earlier MS said they wanted to work with the F/OSS community. It's things like this that provide reason why no one should trust MS.
IMHO the title of TFA is misleading.
"The proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a Free Software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software."
This is a long way from (a logical conclusion that) "Microsoft Wants To Ban Publishing of Samba". Well, OK that might _want_ to, but it only precludes free/open projects from using their specifications.
The SAMBA team have not used published standards (because there weren't any) so far, so it should make no difference. Now, admittedly they might try to imply some breach of NDA or whatever after stuff is published, but that is conjecture. Stating this as an a-priori fact in the title is misleading.
Should we not make some kind of effort to at least appear to be balanced and not start name calling before the fact?
Samba is not a competitor to Microsoft. Samba does not run on Microsoft Windows. Microsoft does not sell or market it's SMB protocols separately from Windows. Microsofts SMB protocols have not been ported to any other operating system on which Samba runs.
I think you could claim that Samba is a competing product, in the sense that SMB is built into Windows, and thus you might replace a Windows installation with another OS + Samba if all you use that Windows installation for is file and print serving, which a lot of Windows boxes do.
It doesn't preclude "free" implementations. It requires the addition of a notice to any software which consumes it (similar to how the GPL requires you to include the GPL with copies of your software, or software you derive and distribute).
This requirement makes it GPL incompatible, but hardly precludes free implementations.
"Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market."
Uh, what market is that? File serving? EMC, Network Appliance, SNAP, and others might challenge that. Maybe I really just don't understand what "market" is being referred to here.
This has already been discussed at length by the industry analysts last week when the EU indicated that it was likely to accept Microsoft's proposal. See http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/zd/200506 02/tc_zd/153327.
There were effectively two requirements resulting from this case: Selling a version of Windows without Media Player, and Licensing the technology behind its Server protocols.
It's the latter case that the EU can't do much about. Microsoft wants to charge a per-copy license fee for implementations of its Server protocols. The EU's ruling requires Microsoft to license the protocols, but explicitly allows the company to charge fees for the licenses. OSS projects hate this "per-seat" license because it doesn't work with their model of giving away copies without even keeping track of how many are in existence. So the OSS community is lobbying the EU Commission to reject ANY per-seat license fee, because it destroys their ability to use such a license.
Unfortunately for the OSS community, the EU Commision doesn't just represent OSS groups: it also represents all the makers of proprietary software throughout Europe. And these proprietary software vendors actually support Microsoft's position here.
See, per-seat licensing is an extremely common way to sell software; revenue is generated in direct proportion to the popularity of your product. These proprietary software vendors are scared at the thought that any company should be forced to give up this form of sales because it is "incompatible with OSS competition." So when the EU shops around this Microsoft proposal to industry leaders, most commercial software companies will probably indicate their satisfaction with Microsoft's per-seat license proposal. They certainly don't want to set up any legal precedents for future run-ins with Open Source competitors claiming THEIR license fees are "unfair."
Most of the base of both SMB/CIFS and DCOM is simply an adaption of the Open Group's DCE-RPC. So the answer is "Not that much."
However, they may own enough of the aspects of it that make it difficult to interoperate directly with DCE-RPC or are involved in specific areas like login (with NT4-compatibility mode, for example) to make life somewhat annoying.
IIRC, DCOM is basically a subset of DCE-RPC and omits the strong security stuff anyway.
Finally, this is hardly a brilliant victory. I.e. Samba is hardly worse off today than it was before simply because this does nothing more than attempt to preserve the status quo.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's one thing to charge for an fork...but without food, that cutlery is just worthless hunks of metal and plastic.
That argument makes no sense at all. For one thing, people CAN and SHOULD be able to offer free and "Free" food. My mother obtained strawberry plants--at no cost--form a fellow parishoner many years ago. They have since thrived and MULTIPLIED and now mum's strawberry patch is too large for her to manage. She put many plants in the compost but gave some to me so I could grow them in the back yard. The ladies out there also sell fresh strawberries, pies and preserves at farmer's markets in addition to giving away stuff to friends.
There you have it--the biological version of "peer-to-peer file sharing". There is no law against the "unauthorised duplication and/or distribution of strawberries" that a large corporation can use to restrict individuals or potential competitors from making strawberries. International dumping laws are the closest thing, and they only apply to governments and large companies who sell at a loss to deliberately eliminate a competitor.
Microsoft is trying to be like Monsanto--who has new breeds of oilseeds and grains and is trying to use the patent system to restrict and control a natural process. Neither is right in doing that. Microsoft's solution around CIFS is like Monsanto saying "we'll publish the information on our roundup-ready Canola, but that co-op of Saskatchewan farmers or that university research group cannot ever make a royalty-free version to compete with our variety".
In both situations I think this is damaging to society--especially in ther case of agriculture. Food is much too important to be the proprietary domain of a molopolistic enterprise. While software is not an important basic need for people, it is nonetheless a vital part of the global economy, so I believe Micorosft's proposed remedy is entirely insufficient. It holds a monopoly over a protocol that enables information exchange important to the functioning of most business systems. MS has demonstrated in the past it cannot be trusted with SMB/CIFS as it has made changes to deliberately break reverse-engineered systems. Microsoft should've been ordered to relinquish control of the protocol to a standards body like ECMA/IEC/IEEE/ISO...and prohibited from applying restrictions of use which are obviously targeted at preventing their main competitor from operating under the terms of its own choosing.