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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.
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.
Shh.
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.
"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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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.
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.
Developers: We can use your help.