Yeah, I afree about the anti-features. It has one really good feature though, in that it uses libsmbclient to access a local fileshare, then re-exports it as a web interface to allow media players to use it. That's a killer feature for me.
I think vlc on Android can also do this, but they ship their own SMB client code I think.
No problem. Samba is still a really fun and interesting program to work on ! I'm going to be up in Redmond next week working with Microsoft engineers on adding POSIX compatibility to SMB3+ and then at the SNIA Conference in Santa Clara, CA the week after giving a couple of talks, and attending the SMB3 plugfest (where we get to work out all the interoperability bugs with other engineers working on SMB).
I personally use ES file explorer on my Android devices. It has libsmbclient built in (although they make you pay rent to get access to SMB2, which I think is a bit of a crock personally).
I watch movies & TV on my tablet PC at home using this.
Could be done - you'd need to write a wrapper (probably around Ronnie's libnfs. If you want to do it take a look at the wrapper code created for libsmbclient.
Full disclosure - I'm on the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Having said that, please donate to the Conservancy - they are the only organization doing GPL compliance work like this for the Linux kernel. This blog post shows how hard they work behind the scenes (they've been working with Tesla on this violation since June 2013) to help get everyone access to the source code they are entitled to have.
The SMB protocol itself isn't "horridly broken", although SMB1 doesn't support the integrity protection that prevents man-in-the-middle downgrade attacks (SMB3 does).
Specific *implementations* can be broken, but if you're fully patched there are no existing vulnerabilities here.
> Are you sure they even have users? > The good news, without Darcs, Git, or Mercurial we'd still have SVN and CVS to choose between.
Now you've just outed yourself as a troll, which I was starting to suspect. Saying "Are you sure they even have users?" in the same sentence as git means you're deliberately trolling, or so unfamiliar with modern software development and the importance of git as a Conservancy project that I'm surprised you are even aware of a site like slashdot.
Either way, you're not worth responding to anymore.
"These paragraphs are disingenuous in several ways.
First, Conservancy has consistently been willing to meet, but merely insisted as a ground rule that the conduct of the meeting must be professional and civil. This was both responsible and a smart move on their part. The meeting isnâ(TM)t going to be productive if it involves shouting and insults, and they had reason to believe that was a real possibility.
If you donâ(TM)t know the personalities involved here, you might not understand why such a ground rule would be necessary. Let me simply say this: I have known Conservancyâ(TM)s Executive Director, Karen Sandler, for a decade now, and worked very closely with her on a number of efforts, some of which involved contentious counterparties. I have never seen Karen lose her temper nor engage in personal insults or ad hominem arguments, not even with parties who frankly deserved it. She has consistently gone out of her way to keep dialogue constructive, to treat people with respect, and wherever possible to find solutions that work for everyone, even in very difficult conversations. If Karen is unwilling to meet with someone without getting agreement on ground rules, there must be a very serious reason for that.
So when SFLC says âoethey have never once agreed to meet with usâ, I read that as âoeConservancy wasnâ(TM)t willing to waste time on a pointless face-to-face meeting on SFLCâ(TM)s home turf with no written agenda and with SFLC refusing to explicitly commit to basic ground rules of civil discourseâ. If I were running Conservancy, I would have made exactly the same decision."
> Either, you can separate your advocacy from your services; that is > SFC services can provide legal and infrastructure services to any >project that satisfies basic FOSS criteria, without being rejected on > philosophical grounds.
Well the projects that were rejected were done so because they did not want to give up corporate control, despite satisfying basic FOSS criteria.
You are correct in that Conservancy philosophy is not to provide a home for corporate-controlled and wholly owned projects, only projects that act in the best interests of their developers and users. Such projects are better hosted in other organizations, and indeed we recommend such orgs to projects that we don't accept. There is a home for corporate-controlled and wholly owned projects, just not Conservancy.
That *is* an extra condition on top of basic FOSS criteria, as we don't just look at the license alone.
> I can't help but wonder whether this issue isn't at the heart of your > trademark dispute with the SFLC in the first place
I don't know and won't speculate what is behind the SFLC reasoning. However you do bring up a very important point about Conservancy being selective. We should be clearer and more public about the criteria for acceptance.
> an advocacy group driven by a particular social and ideological agenda and closely linked to a few companies and interests
Conservancy does have a particular social and ideological agenda, but we are clear and transparent about that. We are not closely linked to "a few companies and interests", the funding is broad-based (check out the online accountancy forms for details).
Good points all, and I don't disagree with most of them.
However, "I just don't see you as an unbiased actor working in the best interest of the FOSS community" IMHO is a little harsh:-). I think my reputation speaks for itself here. But that's your opinion and you're entitled to it:-).
> And since there is no need for anybody to sign up for anything > with the SFC, I simply urge caution and reflection for anybody > considering applying to be "an SFC project"
*Absolutely* correct. In fact, as I'm on the applications committee as well as on the Board I see a lot of projects apply for which the SFC is absolutely the wrong place. We try and gently dissuade them and get them to go elsewhere.
You'd be very surprised I think at some of the projects we've turned away, some with *significant* financial support attached to them, simply because they don't fit with the Conservancy philosophy of how Free Software projects should be run. You can see that by looking at the current project list for an idea of what we require.
Can't name any names unfortunately as applications are done privately, so you'll just have to trust me on this:-).
Having money and being a Free Software advocate are not mutually exclusive. For the best example of this, look at John Gilmore who is a tech multi-millionaire and a strong proponent of Free Software (that's how he made his money).
> you became abusive and insulting
Please document where I have been abusive or insulting. I disagree with you, sure. But disagreement is not abuse or an insult.
> You, on the other hand, are talking out of both sides of your mouth, since the SFC very much seeks copyright assignment.
Offering a service is not "seeking copyright assignment". It is a *service*, which developers can use if they need to. I personally, like you, would recommend that they not do so. However, if you don't own your own copyrights (because your company does) but you wish to make sure such copyrights are only used to support Free Software, then advocating for your company to assign copyrights on code you wrote to Conservancy is an excellent idea.
> if you're looking for an source organization, look carefully at their track record, their biases, and their potential conflicts of interest.
On this, you and I fully agree. I'm confident in the track record, biases and potential conflicts of interest documented by Conservancy. I think Conservancy's transparency is the right thing to do here.
It may have escaped your notice, but promoting Free Software *is* political activism. This is what Conservancy was founded to do.
If all you want is technical excellence, the Open Source Team is over there to the left.
And FOSS developers - please don't assign your copyrights to anyone unless you really have to. The above from doctorvo is spectacularly bad advice. I've always kept my own copyrights, and I encourage you to do so.
I'm guessing you're somewhat younger. I've been working on Free Software since the late 1980's and have seen many of the disasters that can befall projects that don't take care of the copyright and legal details. It's all sunshine and roses until *real* money gets involved. Then watch out !
The reason I'm a Conservancy supporter and board member is that, although the staff are also younger, they *care* about details like that. And they *care* about the projects. Details matter.
Again, this is simply not true. Samba was one of the initial projects in the Conservancy, and we requested Conservancy have a copyright holding ability as it made it easier for us to accept corporate donations of code. Many corporations do not grant individual developers personal (C), but are fine with a charity holding the (C) on their behalf.
At the time we did not allow corporate ownership of code in Samba, as we didn't want corporations to have the ability to do enforcement actions on their own, without going through what are now called the "Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement" (they weren't written down so concisely back then).
Believe it or not there were occasions when corporations used GPL enforcement to threaten each other over use of Open Source code, and we (Samba) needed to defuse that. I personally know of several examples of this being the case.
Now can, and clearly will, spin Conservancy's actions as being the most negative and devious of activities, but as someone with intimate knowledge of this I feel it necessary to set the record straight for any readers.
"The SFC's primary function is GPL compliance enforcement."
That is simply not true (I'm a Conservancy Board member). The *overwhelming* majority of staff time is spent on maintaining projects (doing accountancy, running conferences, handling expense reports and contacting etc.). There is a negligible amount of time spent in enforcement.
Enforcement makes headlines, but isn't a tiny fraction of what Conservancy does.
Slashdot Mirror
You can. Chromebooks have "developer mode" which allows you control of the box yourself. It's required by the licenses of the code inside.
Yeah, I afree about the anti-features. It has one really good feature though, in that it uses libsmbclient to access a local fileshare, then re-exports it as a web interface to allow media players to use it. That's a killer feature for me.
I think vlc on Android can also do this, but they ship their own SMB client code I think.
I actually don't use a Chromebook myself, I have a Linux laptop instead so can't give you screenshots.
For single sign-on you'll need to have your Chromebook joined to the AD Domain (also using Samba underneath).
Reconnection on restart isn't there yet, but is an obvious enhancement to consider (don't want to comment on future product plans).
No problem. Samba is still a really fun and interesting program to work on ! I'm going to be up in Redmond next week working with Microsoft engineers on adding POSIX compatibility to SMB3+ and then at the SNIA Conference in Santa Clara, CA the week after giving a couple of talks, and attending the SMB3 plugfest (where we get to work out all the interoperability bugs with other engineers working on SMB).
https://www.snia.org/events/st...
See you there ! :-).
It uses the smb url syntax that the Gnome nautilus and KDE file browers use. See here for details:
https://www.samba.org/samba/do...
Although the smb:// bare syntax for browsing won't work as NetBIOS is (or should be) dead, dead, dead :-).
I personally use ES file explorer on my Android devices. It has libsmbclient built in (although they make you pay rent to get access to SMB2, which I think is a bit of a crock personally).
I watch movies & TV on my tablet PC at home using this.
Could be done - you'd need to write a wrapper (probably around Ronnie's libnfs. If you want to do it take a look at the wrapper code created for libsmbclient.
https://github.com/sahlberg/li...
Nope. It's just a FLOSS wrapper around FLOSS libsmbclient.
Nothing proprietary here.
Don't wanna pay for Microsoft CALs ? Use Samba4-Active Directory.
Problem solved :-).
Yes, it's a wrapper around libsmbclient. Works well !
Feel free to ask me any questions you might have.
Full disclosure - I'm on the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Having said that, please donate to the Conservancy - they are the only organization doing GPL compliance work like this for the Linux kernel. This blog post shows how hard they work behind the scenes (they've been working with Tesla on this violation since June 2013) to help get everyone access to the source code they are entitled to have.
https://sfconservancy.org/supp...
The SMB protocol itself isn't "horridly broken", although SMB1 doesn't support the integrity protection that prevents man-in-the-middle downgrade attacks (SMB3 does).
Specific *implementations* can be broken, but if you're fully patched there are no existing vulnerabilities here.
Yes, but Samba also isn't vulnerable to WannaCry or EternalBlue, so that makes a difference.
> Are you sure they even have users?
> The good news, without Darcs, Git, or Mercurial we'd still have SVN and CVS to choose between.
Now you've just outed yourself as a troll, which I was starting to suspect. Saying "Are you sure they even have users?" in the same sentence as git means you're deliberately trolling, or so unfamiliar with modern software development and the importance of git as a Conservancy project that I'm surprised you are even aware of a site like slashdot.
Either way, you're not worth responding to anymore.
Please read this:
http://www.rants.org/2017/11/c...
for a possible answer to your question. I'm surprised this isn't linked to from the main article.
Full disclosure, I'm on the Board of Directors of SFC.
There is a good answer to this here, which I'm surprised isn't linked to from the main article:
http://www.rants.org/2017/11/c...
Notably:
"These paragraphs are disingenuous in several ways.
First, Conservancy has consistently been willing to meet, but merely insisted as a ground rule that the conduct of the meeting must be professional and civil. This was both responsible and a smart move on their part. The meeting isnâ(TM)t going to be productive if it involves shouting and insults, and they had reason to believe that was a real possibility.
If you donâ(TM)t know the personalities involved here, you might not understand why such a ground rule would be necessary. Let me simply say this: I have known Conservancyâ(TM)s Executive Director, Karen Sandler, for a decade now, and worked very closely with her on a number of efforts, some of which involved contentious counterparties. I have never seen Karen lose her temper nor engage in personal insults or ad hominem arguments, not even with parties who frankly deserved it. She has consistently gone out of her way to keep dialogue constructive, to treat people with respect, and wherever possible to find solutions that work for everyone, even in very difficult conversations. If Karen is unwilling to meet with someone without getting agreement on ground rules, there must be a very serious reason for that.
So when SFLC says âoethey have never once agreed to meet with usâ, I read that as âoeConservancy wasnâ(TM)t willing to waste time on a pointless face-to-face meeting on SFLCâ(TM)s home turf with no written agenda and with SFLC refusing to explicitly commit to basic ground rules of civil discourseâ. If I were running Conservancy, I would have made exactly the same decision."
> Either, you can separate your advocacy from your services; that is
> SFC services can provide legal and infrastructure services to any
>project that satisfies basic FOSS criteria, without being rejected on
> philosophical grounds.
Well the projects that were rejected were done so because they did not want to give up corporate control, despite satisfying basic FOSS criteria.
You are correct in that Conservancy philosophy is not to provide a home for corporate-controlled and wholly owned projects, only projects that act in the best interests of their developers and users. Such projects are better hosted in other organizations, and indeed we recommend such orgs to projects that we don't accept. There is a home for corporate-controlled and wholly owned projects, just not Conservancy.
That *is* an extra condition on top of basic FOSS criteria, as we don't just look at the license alone.
> I can't help but wonder whether this issue isn't at the heart of your
> trademark dispute with the SFLC in the first place
I don't know and won't speculate what is behind the SFLC reasoning. However you do bring up a very important point about Conservancy being selective. We should be clearer and more public about the criteria for acceptance.
> an advocacy group driven by a particular social and ideological agenda and closely linked to a few companies and interests
Conservancy does have a particular social and ideological agenda, but we are clear and transparent about that. We are not closely linked to "a few companies and interests", the funding is broad-based (check out the online accountancy forms for details).
Good points all, and I don't disagree with most of them.
However, "I just don't see you as an unbiased actor working in the best interest of the FOSS community" IMHO is a little harsh :-). I think my reputation speaks for itself here. But that's your opinion and you're entitled to it :-).
> And since there is no need for anybody to sign up for anything
> with the SFC, I simply urge caution and reflection for anybody
> considering applying to be "an SFC project"
*Absolutely* correct. In fact, as I'm on the applications committee as well as on the Board I see a lot of projects apply for which the SFC is absolutely the wrong place. We try and gently dissuade them and get them to go elsewhere.
You'd be very surprised I think at some of the projects we've turned away, some with *significant* financial support attached to them, simply because they don't fit with the Conservancy philosophy of how Free Software projects should be run. You can see that by looking at the current project list for an idea of what we require.
Can't name any names unfortunately as applications are done privately, so you'll just have to trust me on this :-).
Having money and being a Free Software advocate are not mutually exclusive. For the best example of this, look at John Gilmore who is a tech multi-millionaire and a strong proponent of Free Software (that's how he made his money).
> you became abusive and insulting
Please document where I have been abusive or insulting. I disagree with you, sure. But disagreement is not abuse or an insult.
> You, on the other hand, are talking out of both sides of your mouth, since the SFC very much seeks copyright assignment.
Offering a service is not "seeking copyright assignment". It is a *service*, which developers can use if they need to. I personally, like you, would recommend that they not do so. However, if you don't own your own copyrights (because your company does) but you wish to make sure such copyrights are only used to support Free Software, then advocating for your company to assign copyrights on code you wrote to Conservancy is an excellent idea.
> if you're looking for an source organization, look carefully at their track record, their biases, and their potential conflicts of interest.
On this, you and I fully agree. I'm confident in the track record, biases and potential conflicts of interest documented by Conservancy. I think Conservancy's transparency is the right thing to do here.
It may have escaped your notice, but promoting Free Software *is* political activism. This is what Conservancy was founded to do.
If all you want is technical excellence, the Open Source Team is over there to the left.
And FOSS developers - please don't assign your copyrights to anyone unless you really have to. The above from doctorvo is spectacularly bad advice. I've always kept my own copyrights, and I encourage you to do so.
I'm guessing you're somewhat younger. I've been working on Free Software since the late 1980's and have seen many of the disasters that can befall projects that don't take care of the copyright and legal details. It's all sunshine and roses until *real* money gets involved. Then watch out !
The reason I'm a Conservancy supporter and board member is that, although the staff are also younger, they *care* about details like that. And they *care* about the projects. Details matter.
doctorvo wrote:
"Enforcment is the SFC's primary function"
Again, this is simply not true. Samba was one of the initial projects in the Conservancy, and we requested Conservancy have a copyright holding ability as it made it easier for us to accept corporate donations of code. Many corporations do not grant individual developers personal (C), but are fine with a charity holding the (C) on their behalf.
At the time we did not allow corporate ownership of code in Samba, as we didn't want corporations to have the ability to do enforcement actions on their own, without going through what are now called the "Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement" (they weren't written down so concisely back then).
https://sfconservancy.org/copy...
Believe it or not there were occasions when corporations used GPL enforcement to threaten each other over use of Open Source code, and we (Samba) needed to defuse that. I personally know of several examples of this being the case.
Now can, and clearly will, spin Conservancy's actions as being the most negative and devious of activities, but as someone with intimate knowledge of this I feel it necessary to set the record straight for any readers.
doctorvo wrote:
"The SFC's primary function is GPL compliance enforcement."
That is simply not true (I'm a Conservancy Board member). The *overwhelming* majority of staff time is spent on maintaining projects (doing accountancy, running conferences, handling expense reports and contacting etc.). There is a negligible amount of time spent in enforcement.
Enforcement makes headlines, but isn't a tiny fraction of what Conservancy does.
Well network programming is what I do all day, so... :-)
Try learning go Bruce (golang.org). It's C done *right*. If I had to write Samba again from scratch, I'd do it in go.