Samba - The Interoperability Dance

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"The necessity for such contortions has been removed by the 2007 judgement of the European Commission, which requires Microsoft to publish its protocols in their entirety - without evasion, inconsistencies, broken standards and obfuscations - and to comply with the commonly understood meaning of open standards and protocols as they have been implemented by other participants in the computing industry.

"Although, as Allison notes, "We now have specs. But we still have to work out what Windows does, so that's not changed. If we try to figure something out we go to Windows and write a test for it, and see how Windows does it. But it's a lot easier now, because we can go to the spec and see how it's supposed to work. At that point we have recourse to go to Microsoft and say, 'Hey, we think there's a bug in the spec here', and they will fix it, and they do."

"It's a different kind of work, and we're hoping it will change the kind of people who work on Samba, because before you had to be weird. You had to have a particular mindset that enjoyed doing that stuff, and most programmers don't. Most programmers don't like playing guessing games. They want to be able to write easy code that just works. Most people don't want to work out how something is supposed to work before they can write a piece of code..."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Linux's Active Directory Killer Is A Step Closer(Jan 23, 2009)
• Integrating legacy Windows applications on a Linux Desktop environment - part II(Jan 22, 2009)
• LDAP and Kerberos, So Happy Together(Jan 13, 2009)
• What Is SMB?(Jan 08, 2009)
• Create an Encrypted Samba Share(Jan 05, 2009)
• Andrew Bartlett on Samba, Microsoft, and Active Directory(Oct 23, 2008)