Samba News in Advocacy

Groklaw has posted a transcript and audio files (both mp3 and ogg) in which Volker Lendecke and Jeremy Allison of the Samba Team discuss the Court of First Instance ruling in Luxembourg with Georg Greve of the FSFE and counsel Carlo Piana. From the introduction to the discussion, moderated by Sean Daly:

This is living history. I wanted you and your children and your grandchildren to know some of those they can thank, because when almost all the vendors were signing peace pacts with Microsoft, taking settlement money and slinking away from the case, they stayed to fight to the end. Their role was essentially to speak for FOSS and to make sure the court and the EU Commission understood the technology and the needs of Linux and Samba and all those trying to compete with Microsoft from the Free Software/Open Source community. Unbelievably, they won.

Powerfile, a Santa Clara, California based backup storage vendor, has released a Blu-ray based backup solution supporting up to 120Tb of storage accessible using CIFS (via Samba) or NFS. The new story at Linuxworld.com begins:

Here's a rare event: Blu-ray in a business archiving system. U.S. archive product supplier PowerFile has upgraded its Active Archive Appliance to the A3 Enterprise Edition, using 50GB Blu-ray disks instead of DVDs as before. ... The library units are virtualized by ArcOS with disks being presented as volumes in a single logical storage space. This offers 70TB of capacity which is accessed over two gigabit Ethernet ports as a network-attached storage system (NAS) via NFS, CIFS and HTTP protocol. Expansion library units can increase capacity to 120TB.

Groklaw has an interview with FSFE President Georg Greve. The interview was conducted in Luxembourg during the MS EU appeal trial. The interview relates to Samba creator Andrew Tridgell's testimony at the trial.

We were extremely happy to have Andrew Tridgell over to speak on behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba Team which you know have been working together throughout the entire case. We had Jeremy Allison over for the interim measures hearing and so this time it was, you know, the founder of the Samba project. Andrew Tridgell is, you know, uniquely skilled to talk about these issues; also, he is a very good speaker and, you know, intimately knowledgeable in the whole area, so could easily rebut anything that Microsoft's experts were bringing up in terms of fog and smoke grenades and put a lot of clarity, I believe, into the case.

Thanks to Sean Daly for the link to his interview.

For those who didn't see it yesterday, Slashdot reported on ZDNet's coverage of the Microsoft case before the European Commission. Tridge (Samba creator Andrew Tridgell) testified before the court. A ruling isn't expected for some months.

Groklaw has an interview with the FSFE's counsel Carlo Piana. This interview comes on the heels of the Microsoft antitrust penalty hearings in Brussels last Friday.

But what concerns us most is that you need to control the end-user license so the end-user license shouldn't be the GNU GPL. So that's the main problem with the conditions. They [Microsoft] want that our implementation, the Free Software implementation of their information, which is a separate product developed by, independently by other companies, would be forced to be licensed under non-Free Software, non-copyleft conditions. That's plainly unacceptable, because the only real competition now is under the GNU GPL.

Thanks to Sean Daly for the link to his interview.

As reported previously, Team member John H. Terpstra wrote a series of articles on the adoption of Linux on the desktop. Now, SearchOpenSource.com is running a followup, interviewing John and asking him to respond to reader reactions to his opinion pieces. John doesn't shy away from the tough questions.

Unfortunately, successful companies become fat and lazy. Laziness leads to larceny. Larceny is the substance of mind and action that takes hold of protectionist measures such as software patents, restrictive licensing, and other mechanisms to minimize and eliminate competition.

For the complete interview, see Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of "Terpstra responds: Is Linux PC adoption sabotage FUD or fact?"

For those who missed the Slashdot article, Samba Team member John H. Terpstra has written a series of articles for searchopensource.com on obstacles to the adoption of Linux on the desktop. John offers a real life example to lead into his thoughts on the subject, which makes for some compelling reading.

So Linux desktop computers cost more than Microsoft Windows PCs do, and it's hard to find devices and drivers for Linux. Is that such a big deal? Well, in this story of just two Linux PC buyers, such difficulties stopped one from using Linux and the other only succeeded by being very persistent. Multiply that by millions of PC users, and you have a big deal.

For more see Part 1, Part 2, and part 3 of "Stopping Linux desktop adoption sabotage."

Infogiciel.info is running an article on the French Agriculture and Fishing Ministry moving 500 NT4 servers to Mandriva Linux. Samba is handling the file and print server duties in the Mandriva setup. The article offers some insight into the French Agriculture Ministry's migration concerns and how Mandriva tried to address those concerns.

The article is in French and is available here. (Or here, in English via Google translate.)

ZDNet UK is running a story on the antitrust concessions Microsoft has offered in the EU case. Samba Team member Volker Lendecke is quoted throughout the piece and offers some nice insight into the difficulties Free/Open Source Software developers have with Microsoft's recent royalty-free licence proposal.

Volker sees the information Microsoft is making available as "completely pointless." The article continues:

For example, the royalty-free licence provides basic information on how a Microsoft server opens a file. But information on how to manage file privileges is not included under the royalty-free licence, which means that developers cannot write code that can open a file held on a Windows file server, unless they sign up to the royalty-bearing licence that contains information on file privilege protocols, said Lendecke.

For more on this, please see the complete article, Microsoft's antitrust concessions are 'pointless'.

Eweek is running an article on the EU/Microsoft case. The article does a nice job outlining some of the complexities of the case.

A core sticking point is the licenses' per-seat fees, which make them useless for open-source projects, according to open-source developers.

But where it comes to these crucial licenses, the Commission's hands may be tied. "If the Commission requires Microsoft to make its protocol licensing GPL [General Public License]-compatible, it could jeopardize their entire case," said Jonathan Zuck, president of ACT (the Association for Competitive Technology), which supports Microsoft's side of the case.

Samba Team member Volker Lendecke offers his thoughts on the case in an interview within the article. Volker explains the importance of the server protocols to open source projects like Samba.

We want all the protocols, so that Windows clients and other servers fully believe we are a Windows-compatible implementation. It's the network behavior we want to clone, but the implementation behind that is different. That's where we see that we really can compete, by making it more efficient, more secure or whatever.

For more, see the complete article EU's Hands May Be Tied in Microsoft Case.

Samba Team member Volker Lendecke was interviewed for an eweek piece on the recent EU/MS happenings (see the earlier news.samba.org story).

The commission's remedies still have an opportunity to make a real difference, open-source competitors say. While Microsoft effectively took RealNetworks and Netscape out of the game before antitrust measures could make a difference, that isn't yet the case with workgroup servers, Lendecke said.

The article does a nice job of articulating the issues of concern for open source developers as this case continues. To read more, see Open-Source Developers: Microsoft Licensing Must Be GPL-Compatible.

Everyone is reporting on this, but since Samba and our very own Jeremy Allison get mentioned in this article by ZDNet UK, we'll mention it, too. The European Commission is not satisfied with Microsoft's attempts to comply with the EC's order to open up Window's server protocols. MS proposed a licensing scheme which would provide access to protocol information for a fee.

The server interoperability licence proposed by Microsoft treats open source vendors unfairly and has unreasonably high royalties, according to the EC.

For the full story, see EU rejects Microsoft's licence offer. And here's the original article with Jeremy that is referenced.

Tom Adelstein has written an article for Linux Journal on Samba and Linux in a Microsoft environment.

Interestingly, IT managers who have deployed Linux with Samba have found that Samba requires less expensive and lower power servers than does the Windows software. Additionally, by using open-source software and Linux, managers can remove the expense of Windows server licenses.

The piece begins with an analysis of benchmark results on Samba 3 performance (tests were done by IT Week), but then moves into an overview of Samba3 features. For more, read the full article, Linux in Government: Another Look at Linux in the MS Infrastructure.

ZDNet UK is reporting that the Free Software Foundation is

lobbying the European government to reject the server licence that Microsoft has proposed following the European Commission's antitrust ruling. Microsoft's terms, says the FSF, will mean that open source software such as the widely-used Samba file and print server software, will not be included in the interoperability measures intended by the EU.

For more, see the full article, Microsoft won't dance with Samba.

Our very own Jeremy Allison is being quoted frequently these days, what with the recent EU decision on Microsoft. Consider the following your jra quick reference chart:

• Newsforge: Jeremy Allison weighs in on EU/MS appeal decision
• IT News: Competitors welcome European ruling against Microsoft
• Linux business Week: Microsoft Loses Bid To Stay EC Order

The following quote is from IT News, but it appears in some form in all three articles.

Jeremy Allison, a key developer on the Samba project, said the ruling "is meaningless" if royalties must be paid for each copy that uses the protocol because of the terms imposed by the General Public License.

In addition to licensing protocols, Microsoft must also ship a version of its Windows OS without Windows Media Player.

ZDNet UK is running a story on the city of Bergen's move to Linux servers. Financial savings for software and maintenence are cited as the chief motivations for the city's adoption of Linux and open source applications. Samba gets a positive mention as well.

As well as using Linux on the blade servers, Bergen has chosen to use open-source software to run the majority of the basic functions, including the file server. "On the server side just about everything we are using is open source, for example, we are using Samba server with OpenLDAP to replace the Windows domain controller," said Tuftedal.

There has been a lot in the online press lately about which platform actually has a lower total cost of ownership. They city of Bergen reached the following conclusion:

The use of Linux and other open-source applications has saved Bergen considerable costs in licensing, and Tuftedal expects that the software will be more stable cutting down on support costs.

"We also saved 40 to 50 percent on licensing and support costs by doing the server upgrade -- we expect it to be more stable and easy to manage."

For more, see the complete ZDNet UK article.

Flexbeta has posted a comparision of SLES9 and Windows 2003 server. The article includes an "out-of-the-box" comparison of Windows and SLES file sharing speeds (using netbench). The results look good for Samba:

With this hardware Windows 2003 Server seems to max out on performance at approximately 30 Clients with a throughput of about 135Mbps, where SLES seems to max out on performance at approximately 60 Clients with a throughput of about 255Mbps. The response time is also about twice as fast on SLES9 than on Win2k3 on the same hardware. So, in theory, you can handle twice as many clients on the same hardware using SLES9 compared to using Windows 2003 Server.

Also:

Novell's SLES9 pretty much more than doubles the performance of Microsoft's Windows 2003 Server on the exact same hardware in both categories. This is very, very impressive, and shows the strengths of both Samba and the Linux kernel [...]

For more, head over to Flexbeta and read the full report.

Waters is reporting that London's FTSE has adopted Linux due in large part to Samba. FTSE considered several alternatives when it decided against using Microsoft. The following indicates Samba's role in convincing the company to go with Linux:

So, Linux comes out cheaper, but it was scalability, availability and reliability that led FTSE to opt for the clustered SAMBA environment with LifeKeeper.

Read the full article here.

The Channel Insider has an article advocating Samba as an alternative to Windows Server 2003 when Microsoft ends its support of NT4. The article is a quick and easy read and excellent for anyone considering Samba. The author outlines several reasons why Samba should be considered. For example:

Samba is also fast. When I first tested Samba in 1999, it was already delivering files faster than NT. It's only gotten better since then.

For more, read the complete article here.

If you purchased Microsoft products (or a computer with Microsoft products installed) between May 18, 1994 and March 17, 2003 (inclusive) for use in Minnesota, you may be eligible to receive vouchers for future software and/or hardware product purchases -- even if you're not using them to buy Microsoft stuff. Read More.

Story from Chris Hertel.