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

Same Ol' Same Ol'

[MightyMartian]

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.

Will it be rejected?

[NetNifty]

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?

So?

[pavera]

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

Re:So?

[stevey]

According to at least one of the Samba developers documentation wouldn't be useful anyway:

"There can't be a specification that's worth anything," says Jeremy Allison, joint lead of the Samba Project.

"The source code itself is the specification . The level of detail required to interoperate successfully is simply not documentable - it would produce a stack of paper so high you might as well publish the source code."

(Source - Found via the Implementing CIFS book)

Easy solution... charge a penny for Samba

[carlivar]

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.

Re:A simple solution

[jridley]

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.