Microsoft prohibits GPLed work via licensing of CIFS standards

MJ Ray markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk
Sat Apr 6 22:51:09 UTC 2002


Martin Keegan <martin at no.ucant.org> wrote:
> This action is an attempt to hurt Samba. Samba is critical to the
> wider acceptance of free software.

It need not be, although it currently is.  Samba is just an implementation
of someone else's interfaces, which is not normally a good way to succeed. 
You're always going to be behind and they have the upper hand.  Why help
them to continue their misrule?

What we need is a reliable read-write user-driven mount over an encrypted
connection.  For Linux, AVFS looks like the best potential solution at
present, so if you want to help there, find how to fix their ssh module (or
document it better so that I can figure it out) so as to talk to my
ssh-agent (probably echoing the details into a ssh_ctl or similar), if it's
possible.  For now, I have AVFS doing ftp mounts and the like.

I expect this sort of thing is simple for hurd ;-)

> If they can't get Samba as part of the package, many users won't choose a
> free system, they'll chose a proprietary system. [...]

Will they still, if we have a better alternative?  Surely Samba is normally
used during migration.  You never know, availability of a more secure remote
mount may make them have to implement it in their OS at last.  Then we have
the upper hand.




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