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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.""
Why does Microsoft even care about windows networking? Windows net"working" is so incredibly, horribly bad, i've been yearning for a windows version of Samba to come out just so i can have decent response times, and adequate reliability.
And network speeds/cpu speeds keep getting faster! Its just unacceptably slow, and they keep making things worse (SP2, etc.). QUite frankly, ive lost faith in Microsoft to program anything effecient.
Oh yeah, Samba rulez!
What competition? 'FOSS' has just barely begun making a small dent in some Microsoft markets. Or would you care to list some? I don't see people migrating to Linux/KDE/GNOME on the desktop en masse, I don't see OOo actually competing in any meaningful way with Office, there are no 'FOSS' games of any consequence, no high-end development tools with the exception of Eclipse, no... well, you get the idea. In the server space Linux is taking more market away from Unix (Solaris, HP) than Windows - if anything Windows is growing there as well.
And all of these modest advances are happening only because big companies (IBM, Novell, Sun, Apple) are experimenting with open source.
So where is this 'competition' that Microsoft has to fear?
The roman empire still exists, and is infact one on the biggest orgainastions in the world. You may have heard of them, they just elected a new Caesar a few weeks ago. They are currently commonly reffered as roman catholics