Jeremy Allison Calls Microsoft Dangerous Elephant

oranghutan writes "At the annual Linux.conf.au event being held in Wellington, NZ, one of the lead developers for the Samba Team (and Google employee) Jeremy Allison described Microsoft as 'an elephant that needs to be turned to stop it trampling the open source community.' Allison has been an outspoken critic of the vendor since he quit Novell over a deal it did with Microsoft that he saw as dangerous to open source intentions. And now he has evolved his argument to incorporate new case studies to explain why Microsoft's use of patents and its general tactics on free software are harmful.

Comments

Re:It wouldn't be a problem

[ratboy666]

Um...

SAMBA wasn't developed as a clone or a replacement for anything Microsoft produced. In fact, SAMBA (then known as server, or nbserver) predated Windows NT release.

Microsoft themselves offered patches early on (1993), even before the product was named SAMBA. Probably because it was advantageous to Microsoft. Simply, the idea was to have Unix boxes act as file servers for Windows. Windows didn't support NFS (directly - SMB is the native protocol - Beame and Whiteside supported NFS on NT in 1994, but this would be an extra-cost client expense).

Of course, eventually NT "grew up" and began to support more infrastructure operation, but, even today, SAMBA is a vital part of the "Windows Enterprise". If you are running Power or Sparc on servers and want to share to Windows, it's really the way to go.

AT&T offered a licensed Microsoft SMB implementation (Advanced Server for Unix), which was sub-licensed by some Unix vendors (SUN, HP, SCO, and possibly others). Unfortunately the quality of the implementation was questionable. SUN spent two years cleaning up the code before releasing it as PC-Netlink (HP and SCO may have offered it earlier). Microsoft didn't release the NT SMB code to AT&T until 1994. SUN released PC Netlink on Feb 1, 1999.

Which meant that from 1992/3 to 1999, the only way to run an SMB native file server on SUN was to use SAMBA. (You could have run NFS using Beame & Whiteside/Hummingbird).

How is SAMBA copying anybody here? (if we assume that a Windows NFS client had been made available by Microsoft, SAMBA would never have been popular).