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Samba Will Be Better Thanks to Microsoft Agreement

Samba Will Be Better Thanks to Microsoft Agreement

by , 4:25 PM EST, January 4th, 2008

Under the terms of the March 24, 2004 European Commission antitrust ruling against Microsoft and a subsequent loss of the appeal, Microsoft has been required to hand over documentation that will allow the Samba team to make Samba work much better, according to LinuWorld recently.

Samba is an open source project used by Mac OS X, Linux, and other UNIXes to interface to the Windows file and print system.

"They're giving us all the documentation to make everything work," said Jeremy Allison, co-author of Samba. "We will have no more excuses to suck ... if we don't have something, we won't be able to say it’s not our fault we don’t know how to do it."

The Samba developers will have to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA) for the documentation, but will still be able to write open source software in Samba to make the interface work as intended.

There have been persistent reports of minor gotchas and technical difficulties in the Samba implementation, including Mac OS X, over the years, and this agreement will be good news especially for Mac OS X in the enterprise.

Observer Comments

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Close Name:Guest
Fri Jan 04, 2008 7:29 pm Subject: Finally, Samba will work!

Samba finally has documentation so they can interoperate with already released systems. Of course, Microsoft will change the protocol for XP service pack 3 and Vista service pack 1, so Samba will break in subtle ways, and they'll have to take another 3 years of suing Microsoft to get newer documentation [and this process just repeats endlessly].

Or am I just being optimistic?


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Close Name:Guest
Fri Jan 04, 2008 8:17 pm Subject: Is there any Microsoft Program wich works?

Microsoft should stay far from open source products in order to keep them running, once "infected" by MS the risk to crash is too high


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Close Name:Guest
Fri Jan 04, 2008 8:32 pm Subject: UNIXes?

I thought the plural of Unix was Unices, just as the plural of Linux is Linuxen.


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Close Name:Guest
Sun Jan 06, 2008 9:54 pm Subject: MS will just change it again

As soon as MS gives the information required by law, they will change how their SMB networking works, and take as long as possible to pass that information along while going through multiple court challenges.


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