Step 1, send an invoice with clear payment terms.

Step 2, send one polite reminder maybe 7 days after the due date.

Step 3, send a Letter Before Action, with a further 7 day deadline (use a firm like thomashiggins.com to turn the legal wheels very cheaply)

Step 4, file a claim in the small claims court (again, thomashiggins.com are very good for this). It may take weeks but you can add interest and all the costs you've incurred.

The few times I've done this (as a consumer) the company has coughed up at some point just before or just after the court papers have gone in. For a truly hopelessly disorganised company this is the only escalation method that works.

The furthest it ever got was with Enterprise car rentals - I had a bailiff threaten to tow one of their vehicles before they would write a cheque.

This is all advice for uncontested debts - obviously if the company has a problem with the debt they may choose to represent themselves and argue the point, but if they were going to do that, they'd probably have engaged you first!

You do realize that many enterprise storage servers made by companies like IBM, Symantec, EMC, Dell etc. are or have been based on Samba code, right ?

Nah, probably not... :-). After all, you know that only Windows storage servers work with Windows clients don't you :-).

Jeremy

/. is not what it was, but then again it never was :-).

I miss the .bruce.perens/bruce.perens/bruce.perens./ wars.. and the "information wants to be wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide" guy :-). And who could forget sig11's "will the real Bruce Perens please stand up" ?

But Tim Potter (old Samba Team member) and I loved the trolls :-).

Jeremy.

Yes, I'm Jeremy Allison - the original poster. I created Samba along with tridge (he was there first, and is much smarter than me though :-). I thought that was obvious, sorry :-).

Jeremy.

There isn't a court-ordered requirement for them to test it. There's a market enforced requirement :-).

Go into Frys (or local Geek store). Look at all the NAS boxes on the shelf. That's all Samba. Every one.

Now imagine you're Microsoft. A new version of Windows comes out and it doesn't work against all the "home NAS media servers" people have. Ooops :-(.

They test against Samba *all the time*, as it's good for their business to do so.

They also go a little above and beyond by helping test the AD server part of Samba (which isn't in wide production use yet) - they do that in their interop labs up in Redmond.

They provide free food for the engineers working late up there. It's not as good as the free Google food (but then again, hey - what is ? :-) :-).

Jeremy.

Oh you mean corporations like IBM, EMC, Netgear, WDC,Google ? Yeah, the GPLv3 really scared them :-).

Listen to my presentation here:

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2011/may/10/why-samba-switched-to-GPLv3/

to explain why GPLv3 is a *better* license for commercial use the GPLv2.

Jeremy.

Possibly their marketing and senior exec's hate it (although I doubt that - Thomas Pfenning is at director level in the Windows org and he think's it's pretty cool.

But I know their engineers think it's cool :-).

Jeremy.

In the words of Francis Urquart:

"You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment.." :-).

It's just an AD server. Why would running under Virtualization environments, Hyper-V, Multiple AD servers, matter ?

Jeremy.

Yes :-). That's why you can use the Windows tools to administer Samba4.0 AD server :-).

Jeremy.

Ahem. Microsoft provided a positive quote for the press release, and were involved in bug fixing to ensure interoperability.

So no, I don't think they hate it :-).

Jeremy.

...or did he send a very slightly differently punctuated/spaced email to every employee, just to see which version ended up leaked? I'm pretty sure that's what Bruce Schneier would do.