09.06.07
Novell’s Role in Hurting Samba and Free Interoperability
“Xandros, Linspire, and Novell are all collaborating with this [MCPP] venom”Samba. Without it, many enterprises would be unable to put GNU/Linux in their datacenter. It has not been long since version 3, but the Samba team has just reached a milestone when it announced the availability of the first alpha of Samba 4. As you may or may not know, Longhorn (Server 2008) from Microsoft has the tendency to reject Samba. Some say it’s a coincidence, but Jeremy Allison heard a word about the Microsoft team being ordered to “f**k with Samba”. The truth might be hard to reveal, but we recently heard an admission from Microsoft that its poor support for Web standards in Internet Explorer was probably deliberate. A look back at similar examples and the Halloween Memos shows you just why this type of stuff happens.
In any event, here is another piece of news. Filled with disgust, we previously mentioned MCPP [1, 2, 3, 4], which is a vicious anti-Free software weapon that Microsoft created and adopted. Xandros, Linspire, and Novell are all collaborating with this venom. They help spread the thing that can poison the impending European ruling on Microsoft abuses. To Microsoft, Novell is truly a lifesaver here. It helps Microsoft escape the wrath of harsh litigation. Essentially, Microsoft bought its way out of the hands of the law. Why would Novell do this? And can Samba developers be blamed for their departure from Novell? Here are some bits from the article:
Five years after being pegged a monopolist, Microsoft is coming under scrutiny for efforts to license its proprietary technology in accordance with antitrust legal demands from U.S. and European regulators.
[...]
“We read the license,” says Allison about MCPP. “It’s impossible to release open source implementations of the product. You have to keep it secret. This defeats the whole idea of open source.”
These are, of course, the consequences of binary bridges. Those who are to blame here include Novell, Xandros, Linspire, and several others (outside the realms of the Linux industry).
