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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.""
As usual, Microsoft turns stinging defeat into a brilliant victory. I have but one question, however, how much of all of this does MS in fact actually own? I mean, all the base LANServer stuff was jointly developed with IBM, and I'm sure IBM wouldn't be too happy with MS trying to shut Samba down.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Won't this proposal likely be rejected too then, seeing as IIRC a major reason the previous one was rejected was because it disallowed open source implementatins?
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Has Microsoft shared interoperability info in the past? Sure if this is accepted it won't make the Samba team's job any easier, but its not going to make it harder than it already is. These guys are amazingly good at reverse engineering MS's stuff. Sure it would be nice if the EU made MS give away the keys to the castle, but really do we need it? All this doom and gloom is completely unfounded.
Samba hasn't had this data in the past, and they've managed to write a darn good SMB/CIFS server. This won't end the Samba project by any means.
I'm not saying MS shouldn't have to share the data, I'm just saying if they don't it won't be the end of the world
So now a non-oss company of SAMBA team members makes one closed source binary that contains only the necessary functions and sells the rights to distribute the binary for $1 to SAMBA. All of the tools that utilize that binary are still open, and any functionality that REQUIRES knowledge of the MS code, must be implemented in that binary. MS is happy, the Linux world is happy, I'm happy. Not as thrilled as if they would allow OSS to use this info, but still happy!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I don't see how this will affect Samba. They've never had access to how SMB/CIFS works in the past, how will not having access to it now affect them?
If anything it shows how strong Linux & F/OSS is. I'd say it's more of a compliment rather than an insult.
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Putting aside criticism of a decision that would support this suggestion from Microsoft, what's to stop the Samba people from incorporating and "selling" their product for $1 (or Euro, or whatever), if the stipulation is that free software can't make use of this?
It would of course require a change in license. But, apart from developers who have a moral objection to terms like this and would no longer work on the project, wouldn't it still be a viable project? Would people no longer be willing to work for free on "dollar-ware" -- especially if the idea is to beat Microsoft at its own game?
Maybe the project would fork: Samba would continue to more or less reverse engineer, and a new project could make use of Microsoft's publication.
This is just a thought. Please, no flames!
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
"If MS had 50% of the market, SAMBA wouldn't have a case"
Even in that case Samba would have a winning case.
You have ALWAYS to allow for interoperatibility; if you don't like it, just don't play the game. Bill Gates is free to take his money and smoke it if he wants (well, even literally, I think that in the States firing a money note is not considered "destroying federal property" now), but if he wants to "build thingies" that interoperaty with anything else, he should allow for anything else to interoperate with hims.
Even in the USA with such corporate-favouring laws you should have present the "Lexmark case". I don't think Lexmark holds 50% of any bussiness, still they lost regarding the "unofficial" tonner marketeers.
Anti-trust action can be a harsh solution.
Look at the case against Alcoa Aluminum back in the 1940's (or possibly 50's). They were not carrying out any predatory practices against their competitors, just innovating better and faster ways to make and deliver aluminum.
Because they did it so well, they left their competitors in the dust and dominated the market.
The U.S. government forced them to give their trade secrets to their competitors and make major adjustments to their pricing and marketing to allow their less-worthy competitors to profit and gain market share.
So, the precedent is there for the same kind of thing to happen again.
"If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime." - Unknown
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
...(thus making it public knowledge),... Ummm, I think that is the whole point. The EU wants those interface protocols (not code) to be completely open for everyone to use just as freely as MS is able to. Its another matter to lose ownership and have it fall into the public domain.
Perhaps Samba should start charging a penny for the software. And ignore "piracy". And oops, mess up the CVS firewalling and permissions so that everyone can get at the code.
Vote Libertarian
I used to browse at -1 until the spammers made it hard to get through the good stuff in a reasonable time. I started reading at 0. But then this latest crap spammer started copying crap from one thread into another, it wasn't getting modded down, and it was taking too much mental processing separating the copied crap from legitimate replies. So now I'm reading at 1.
License fees:
This is not free software, it is licensed per site. In order to use this software, you are required to pay one cent per site. For the purposes of this license, a site is defined as a planet with people on it.
Why a commercial company should be forced to dismantle and hand itself over to open source.
This is similar to the IBM anti-trust suit in the 1980s where IBM was using different connectors on their models to prevent third-party companies from making compatible hardware. The court forced IBM to use the same connectors for all models in the same family. Some of these connectors became defacto standards for serial and parallel interconnectivity. Microsoft needs to be held to the same standard for software interoperativity.
Thank you for your inquiry. If you wish to deploy this software on uninhabited planets, the fee is discounted by 50%. Craft in space are considered covered by the license for the planet of the port they are registered in in the case of passenger and cargo ships, or the planet they were launched from or most recently made landfall on in the case of research vessels and probes.
Why not just write an open source "Samba Service" for windows which will provide the same functionality without relying on the "Inner Party" (redmond) to provide a closed solution. As an added bonus, you won't have to wait for a "hotfix" or "service pack" when security issues arise.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS