'Mr. Samba' Talks About Samba's Future

Jan Stafford writes "SearchEnterpriseLinux is running an article that gives the inside scoop from Samba guru John H. Terpstra on upcoming new features in Samba-3 and Samba-4, recent events in FUD-fighting and the benefits that businesses can realize by adopting open source early."

Comments

Re:No more war.

[Spy der Mann]

I don't think that will be necessary. I predict that 15 years from now on, Microsoft will either be sweeping their own ashes, or haved moved completely to the gaming business.
The reason? In about 10 years, OpenOffice (or another clone) will kick MS-Office's arse, taking away Microsoft's main revenue. And maybe (MAYBE) by that time, ReactOS will have replaced windows in the same way FreeDOS can replace MS-DOS today. I'm also confident that by that time Linux will have slowly evolved into a really-userfriendly OS.

Unless of course, in the edge of bankruptcy, Microsoft takes the decision to open source their OS and switch their business model to services - but that seems too far fetched.

(Oh - in any case you wonder what the talk was about, I was stating the reasons why Microsoft can't be suing Samba for their networking software)

reality: it's hard

[bcrowell]

I think the reality is that stuff like Samba is extremely hard to do. I work at a community college, and I brought in my own linux box to have on my desk. I set up Samba for printing, and most of the time it worked, but once in a while it would stop the whole queue, which would piss off all my co-workers. So I gave up on Samba.

Some of my co-workers who have macs have mentioned similar problems. (They phrase it as "printing from macs doesn't work," but I assume MacOS X also uses Samba for this, and they're experiencing the same problem I was.)

It's just extremely hard to chase a moving target.

Re:The best make it look easy.

[lilmouse]

For businesses, what is adopting Linux the first step toward?

This one is the question I felt was most press-releasy - it's not a barbed question at all. Another way to ask it is:

Give us some propaganda on why Linux is so great, ok?

Could you name a couple of other Samba-3 features that have a niche and are only used in those niches?

I actually liked this question - it seemed like one of the few real ones. It was a followup to his mentioning the specific things going into Samba 4 for the Sarbanes Oxley disclosure. It's a good question: what really neat, unusual things can Samba do? I can see why the question was sidestepped, but I'd've liked an answer.

Anyway, I'm not very interested in people saying "This is a great product." I want to know why it's a great product.

--LWM