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

It wouldn't be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't be a problem if the FLOSS community would stop stealing from legitimate patents holders. I know you FLOSS developers are busting your ass, writing code, and what not and not getting paid for it, but.....God! What a bunch of losers!

How about inventing something of your own instead of stealing ideas from others!

If you were any good you'd be getting paid for what you're doing.

Re:It wouldn't be a problem

[domatic]

His being a high-profile developer, this part of the rant struck me as absolutely valid despite the making light going on in the rest of the comments:

"So you see this especially in the appliance market where Microsoft will go to a company — off the record as this is never ever done in public — and say 'this product you have there, shame if someone brought a patent suit. So you have two options you can re-architect — here is Windows — or the other thing is why don't you give us a cut on all the free software you are using?'. It is an attempt to create the work that we do, into a Microsoft revenue stream. I don't know about you but that really pisses me off."

The antitrust actions against MS to date have been misplaced IMHO focusing on things like browser bundling. The regulators seem to have no clue about the really evil crap like subverting the ISO and threatening product vendors who use FOSS.

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).

Re:It wouldn't be a problem

[truthsearch]

when Open Source offers something that is *better* than closed, then it will be used.

Not necessarily. I've worked with multiple companies that have "outlawed" open source for supposedly legal reasons. I've also worked in one company that used only MS software because they had a huge contract and preferred the one-vendor solution, even when some cases would call for a better solution from another source. So in many cases open source can't even get in the door because of business decisions, not technical ones.

A rebuttal

[Monkeedude1212]

And I - being no one of significance, am going to call Microsoft a small, fluffy, harmless kitten that needs to be petted.

Take THAT.

Ubuntu and Commercial Software.

[headkase]

Want Open to win? Stop being bloody purists. See, Ubuntu Software Commercial Survey for a pragmatic approach. Ubuntu is a bridge, get the Windows people over first and once they know what they're doing they can compile their own Gentoo. Commercial software on Linux is also such a bridge, let it in: as long as the core operating system is Open who gives a crap. If the commercial is amazingly good compared to the Open then it will survive while the Open matures. But don't deny your users the commercial because you're being a dick about it. Follow the Linux philosophy: Openness, including commercial. Then work with it yourself, I have converted two of my family-members desktops over to Ubuntu within the last month, not including my own. If I wasn't using a "stupid" distribution it wouldn't have happened because I have no idea of the required options while building your kernel. Support the bridges, they all lead into Open.

Re:Ubuntu and Commercial Software.

[CodeBuster]

Having read TFA, the principal objection of Jeremy Allison is not over use of commercial software in Linux per se, but rather over offensive use of patents, creating "walled gardens" which favor one implementation over another regardless of merit, to quash or demand ransom from open source projects. Mr Allison is wise in his conclusion: namely that open source projects should ignore these agreements and continue to produce software freely because, as others have pointed out, (Richard Stallman being prominent among them) patents remain a threat to free software which cannot be avoided at this time. In fact, it is not worth even searching existing patents because willful infringement, or infringing a patent that you know about, carries heavier penalties than simply infringing a patent of which you had no knowledge. The patent holder may decide to file a lawsuit in either case so it doesn't pay to risk more than necessary by being proactive with regard to software patents. Therefore, the open source community should accept the risk and continuing moving forward, for now, while working against software patents on the legal and political advocacy front. This is essentially the same conclusion that Richard Stallman arrived at many years ago.

Random anecdote

[Entropius]

I teach a computational physics class for freshmen.

When I was going over our syllabus, I said: "Email your homework here. Don't send us Microsoft Word documents. My TA and I don't have Word, we're probably not on a computer that does when we grade your homework, and we can't be arsed to go find a decoder for whatever the newest obscure Microsoft format is."

The students were shocked -- you don't have Word? Really? How is this possible? (Answer: LaTeX.)

(Except for the one guy with the Ubuntu laptop, in the back, who chuckled...)

Not New, But I can Corroborate

[mpapet]

"So you see this especially in the appliance market where Microsoft will go to a company — off the record as this is never ever done in public — and say 'this product you have there, shame if someone brought a patent suit. So you have two options you can re-architect — here is Windows — or the other thing is why don't you give us a cut on all the free software you are using?'.

This is very common business practice in the U.S. not exclusive to Microsoft. Bigger companies want two things from the smaller companies they intimidate, revenue and market penetration information. If they don't get it privately, they certainly get it with patent/trademark litigation.

I'm not calling Microsoft out exclusively on this, but it should give the average /. an idea of how fundamentally frozen the American economy is by patent and trademark law.

FLOSS Community Is Their Own Worst Enemy

[Ukab the Great]

I have no love for Microsoft.

But in the last decade I've seen Linux on the Desktop split between two different competing environments and API's, usability experts not being able to get any meaningful traction early on in FLOSS projects, newbies being flamed on IRC for asking questions, legitimate criticism of user experience issues being written of as FUD, billions of FLOSS company dollars going to enterprise systems buyouts and kernel hacker salaries instead of high quality user testing labs (and then saying FLOSS has no money for such things like evil proprietary companies do), etc.

When I look at Microsoft, I don't see FLOSS's greatest enemy; I see a boogeyman and a scapegoat used to explain FLOSS' lack of success at getting outside of a server room.

Re:Flamebait of a story

[poetmatt]

what do you call "Subverting an international commitee" (re: OOXML fiasco)? is that flamebait? If so, what isn't flamebait? When GPL advocates just roll over dead? Or when MS's proprietary specifications become world standards at the behest of MS? color me confused.

Payroll?

[RulerOf]

But then, I'm not on the MS 'turfing payroll

Do you happen to have any idea how I can get on the MS Apologists' payroll?

I'm too broke to keep doing this for free :(

Re:Flamebait of a story

[cwrinn]

What's .NET?

A TLDN, duh.

Microsoft bullies FOSS with patents and conspirato

[ComputerInsultant]

No, the headline is "Microsoft bullies FOSS with patents and conspiratorial coersion."

When Microsoft patents obvious things, then uses those patents to threaten law suits, that is a threat.

If Microsoft was competing by building great software, we would be having a different conversation. This conversation is about Microsoft competing without building software.