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Re: [LUG] Samba is signing up for GPL v3

 

Quoting Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> On Wednesday 11 July 2007 11:06, David Johnson wrote:
>> On Wednesday 11 July 2007 09:26, Tom Potts wrote:
>> > The important things to remember here are:
>> > 1) Samba is a reverse engineering of a proprietary protocol.
>>
>> Actually there are some specs out there, especially for the newer CIFS
>> stuff, although naturally the stuff Microsoft have added is not publicised.
>>
>> > 2) Novell and M$ are working together to increase M$/Linux interactivity
>> > - with the real protocol specs Novell will be able to produce a
>> > smaller/tighter/faster integration without referring to Samba code -
>> > unless M$ does it for them, or perhaps M$ have already done something in
>> > VastaMistake that will prevent Samba catching up (DRM ing something out
>> > of malice) They could right this up on proprietary code so they wont give
>> > a hoot about GPLn.
>>
>> Even with the specs it would take them a lot of time and money to produce a
>> new SMB implementation from scratch, even if you assume that Windows
>> actually follows Microsoft's own specs (it absolutely doesn't). Most likely
>> they'd fork from the current version of Samba and extend that; their
> but they wont need to use samba - they already have the software -   
> its written
> in C  or C++ and talks TCP/IP so it wont take five minutes to convert to
> linux and it wont need the GPL.

This is Microsoft we're talking about, I bet it wouldn't be that easy.  
  For a start the code is probably talored for Windows.

>> changes would then be released as per GPLv2 and could be incorporated back
>> into Samba.
>>
>> I'm not sure what's been added to SMB in Vista, but remember that it has to
>> be backwards-compatible - Vista has to talk with every Windows release from
>> about 3.11 up, so locking Samba out by changing the protocol isn't an
>> option for them.
>>
>> > 3) Samba is for communication with a dying computer OS. You should only
>> > use it to talk to legacy systems while migrating their users. You wont
>> > need to stick it somewhere they have Vasta -they'll be too licensed up to
>> > make it worthwhile.
>>
>> Actually the SMB and CIFS protocols are perfectly good in their own right.
>> There's no reason they couldn't/shouldn't be used in Linux only networks.
>> MacOS also has an implementation and work is on-going to add UNIX-only
>> extensions to Samba so that it actually performs better and with more
>> features for Linux and Mac users.
> This is another case of the naive following the desperate. I've not   
> seen Samba
> offer anything that wasn't already available in *Nix other that the ability
> to talk to windows. OK its easier to use Samba than set your linux systems up
> properly - it takes a second to connect to a Windows share from Linux using
> SMB and several minutes to do the same with NFS but if your going to use
> bodges like that it will come back and haunt you*.
> Tom te tom te tom
> * ok I do too....

I was under the impression that NFS was fairly insecure, although not  
being an expert on general security I may be wrong.

Rob




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