Microsoft prohibits GPLed work via licensing of CIFS standards

M E Leypold @ labnet leypold at informatik.uni-tuebingen.de
Mon Apr 8 09:55:44 UTC 2002


MJ Ray writes:
 > M E Leypold:
 > >    (2) build an own ressource sharing service. 
 > > Option (2) is what you suggest, but to ensure interoperability (which
 > > is the only ticket to getting into existing pure Windows environments)
 > > would require client software for windows. Don't expect MS to write
 > > that, and writing (and promoting) it as a GNU project will also be
 > > difficult, since none of the us AFAIK can access techical
 > > documentation as freely and as early as MS can. I fear that could end
 > > like the Browser war.
 > 
 > But I fear that the current situation is going to end like the proprietary
 > OS "war" of the early 90s.  If you gift MS the clients, they will get more
 > servers than they ever should have.  If Samba provides the initial "way in"
 > (hey, we have the way in) for Free Software, then I am happy, but we should
 > not rest there.  We must provide better services and software for our own
 > clients, so that we cannot be locked out from providing the servers by dirty
 > tricks in the client OS.

Yes -- I agree. We need a better (and more uniform) framework for
sharing, abstracting and visualizing (possibly remote) resources. OK,
I'm now talking about Linux mostly, but I'd like to have is s.th. like
the Plan-9 Filesystem: Everything in a uniform processlocal
namespace. Internet Sockets are just files (no need for netcat),
loopback devices from user space (encrypted block-devices: no problem
then) and so on. It' would be just a matter of the server used to
export a resource encrypted to one side (Internet) and unencrypted to
the other (my home LAN). 

To get a client for that into windows would be the ultimate marketing
hack :-). I admit I'm only dreaming: I do not have the temporal
resources to do that in my free time and haven't found an employer
yet, who would pay for such a project.

Regards -- Markus



More information about the Discussion mailing list