"Open Source Development of a Closed Protocol"

Samba has been very successful in implementing what many think of as a closed protocol, SMB (now renamed CIFS), which is the Microsoft file and print sharing protocol.

As Samba is shipped as part of every Linux distribution, many people erroneously think of Samba as a Linux-only product. Samba was actually started contemporaneously with Linux, and was originally developed on closed-source proprietary UNIX's as a "scratch our own itch" product (in the best Open Source tradition).

What is not widely known is the history of Samba, and how the Samba Team have been able to produce an Open Source implementation of this extremely complex protocol, with both the help and hinderance of Microsoft.

Learn about the protocol itself, how it developed, and the inside story of the complex relationship between Microsoft and the Samba Team.

Also learn about what the future holds for the development of Samba and the SMB/CIFS protocol.

About Jeremy Allison

Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows(tm) compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed mannor similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by Multinational corporations and Educational establishments worldwide. Jeremy handles the release engineering and the co-ordination of Samba development efforts worldwide and acts as a corporate liason to companies using the Samba code commercially.

The main Samba Web site is: http://samba.org/

With a wide background in UNIX and Windows NT systems, Jeremy has been working on Samba since its origin in 1993. Jeremy has been working on UNIX systems since 1986. His postions include Sun, where he worked as a Windowing engineer, supporting the OpenLook intrinsics toolkit, XView, and the Sun X server; Vantive, where as the Network Architect he ported the Vantive server and client products to Windows NT; Cygnus, where he created the fist Windows NT port of the MIT Kerberos 5 Network Security system and worked on the internals of Cygwin32 - the POSIX on NT library; Whistle communications, the first company to fund him to work on Samba.

He now works for SGI, who fund him to work full-time on Samba. SGI is a major contributor to both Samba and Linux, providing the hardware for the main samba.org Web server and also providing network funding for the samba site.