Many manufacturers of NAS (Network Attached Storage) use GPLed OS that have been modified or reduced to their basic components to NAS appliances. I have seen many instances of Linux NAS devices, BSD NAS devices, and yes, NAS devices bases on Windows 2000 for appliances.
A little background:
A NAS device is an appliance dedicated to providing storage on the IP network. It's basically a stripped standard server with ease-of-use features added, and form-fitted into a smaller box. Extremely easy to set up, extremely easy to use.
Companies that make them:
Quantum Snap! www.quantum.com Maxtor www.maxtor.com Network Appliance www.netapp.com IOMEGA www.iomega.com Blue Arc www.bluearc.com and the list goes on and on.
They all provide CIFS and NFS shares, some of the also provide Apple shares, and Novell shares. The point here is that many of them are based on GPLed OS. While their final product may be commercial, this development may restrict their use of CIFS. These products RELY on CIFS. Frankly this may be a ploy by Microsoft to sell more copies of Windows 2000 for Appliances, and take a heavy swipe at the Open Source community.
If NAS vendors can't use CIFS, and the latest CIFS has changed to mess up connectivity, they are dead in two years, as the OS upgrades catch up.
If there is a somebody who could clear that up a bit, that would be great.
I, for one, hope that continued compatibility for the CIFS standard continues in the Samba package. For Linux to lose that functionality, it would kill a lot of possible server implementations.
I'm not at all sure that corporations will be as willing to "upgrade" to XP and whatever follows it as they have been to make upgrades in the past.
I believe Win2K will be THE standard MS office OS for a long, long time. So the problem you are talking about may take more than 2 years to really hit home.
Not really. So long as you have your media, you could still buy a new machine with an XP license, wipe it, and install Window 95 on it...I think. Microsoft licensing currently allows this back-revisioning thing. Which is why when we buy new PCs with Windows XP Pro on them, they are quickly wiped and Windows 2000 Pro is installed instead. This is perfectly legit.
Not that anyone would WANT to install Windows 95 at this point...
Ultimately, you are right. Of course at some point MS will get everyone switched. But I think there will be a LOT more reluctance on the part of big corporations to just go along with MS this time. Increasingly they need to see some real business cases for WHY they should upgrade, and, in particular, WHY NOW. I was only expressing skepticism about the timetable of the problem.
Yep. Win95 sucked ass, 98 slightly less so - so there was a big reason to upgrade. Win2k is actually a somewhat reasonable and reliable operating system, so there's much less incentive to follow along with Microsoft's forced upgrade plans.
This is a very astute comment (IMHO). The real reason behind this is to raise FUD in the minds of vendors looking at Samba on Linux as an alternative to Microsoft's server appliance kit.
Doesn't matter if it's legal or if the patent claims are valid. It's to get the CEO's of appliance companies to go into their engineering dept. and say "see, we should have licensed from Microsoft to be *safe*".
It's all about the dollars and control of the vendors........
My company produce NAS called Discobolos and it's VERY succesfull here in Czech republic and now we are expanding to the Germany. Guess which OS we use? Linux;) And we are 2-3 TIMES(!!!) cheaper and faster then any other product you mentioned...
Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me MS is trying to protect other components from the side effects of being bundled with a GPL'd one, and that there is a bit of confusion (and paranoia) in such statements as this [my attempted clarifications are in brackets]:
[These NAS manufacturers] all provide CIFS and NFS shares, some of the[m] also provide Apple shares, and Novell shares. The point here is that
many of them are based on [a] GPLed OS. While their final product may be commercial, this [approach to] development [i.e. GPL] may restrict their use of CIFS. These products RELY on CIFS. Frankly this may be a ploy by Microsoft to sell more copies of Windows 2000 for Appliances, and take a heavy swipe at the Open Source community.
It seems to me after reading the MS CIFS license that MS actually has a valid concern: they want to publish the CIFS standard and retain intellectual property rights; they want to allow implementors of the standard to be able to implement and sell or give away their implementation and/or their source code; and they want to prohibit implementors from changing the licensing terms of other bundled software components.
Here are the salient parts of Microsoft's CIFS license:
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
3.3IPR Impairing License Restrictions. For reasons, including without limitation, because (i) Company does not have the right to sublicense its rights to the Necessary Claims and (ii) Company's license rights hereunder to Microsoft's intellectual property are limited in scope, Company shall not distribute any Company Implementation in any manner that would subject such Company Implementation to the terms of an IPR Impairing License.
Microsoft is NOT trying restrict use of CIFS. They are trying to prevent a CIFS product vendor from forcing other bundled products to adhere to the same licensing model. Put another way, the popularity of GPL has forced MS to include stipulations to protect non-GPL vendors implementing CIFS from loss of revenue. I just don't see that as a grossly evil act. (Why shouldn't someone want to protect and benefit from the value that they add?)
Also, I think that BSD licences are not specifically singled out in the MS CIFS license because MS lawyers don't consider them "viral" in the above sense of having side effects on bundled software components.
It seems to me that what would be ideal is if vendors could distribute packages in which each component might have its own licensing model: some may be GPL and some may be proprietary; but each party -- creator, implementor, vendor, and end-user -- should be able to declare, discover, and protect their rights with the least amount of legal hassle. It also seems conceivable to me that GPL is not the universal answer to this ideal any more than is closed-source corporate licenses such as MS and/or current digital rights management trends. Surely there must be efforts uderway to improve/facilitate our legal options?
I certainly hope that Samba and Linux and others can implement CIFS for free or with open source. But I don't think MS is preventing this. I also don't think that they're trying to spread FUD. In fact, as someone who is at least making an effort to be a realist, it seems to me that there might be reasonable justifications for MS's viewpoint on this issue. I'm not a great legal scenario craftsman, but suppose a vendor wants to sell a reasonably priced CIFS product for Linux with an optional SLA for a particular market in which the full samba implementation is not desired for security reasons, and the GPL hindered them. Is such a scenario conceivable? I think MS is correct in asserting the non-universality of an equation like FREE = OPEN_SOURCE = GPL. Whatever their merits, they are not the same things, and licenses must be allowed to make such differentiations.
Again, I am neither a lawyer nor a polemic. I just think it's important to see the driving force behind both sides of an issue before deciding their merits. Please correct me if I have misunderstood, misrepresented or missed the real issue. And please help create a working solution to this problem by first understanding and helping others to understand the real issues.
If a given CIFS-appliance vendor doesn't want to be "restricted" by L/GPL, then they use the approved Microsoft implementation. Simple as that, no?
Will someone be able to eventually argue that MS, given its monopoly position, that its protocols, file formats, etc. now form a "common carrier", and that MS needs to not restrict (maybe not facilitate, but not restrict) interpreters of said protocols?
It seems to me after reading the MS CIFS license that MS actually has a valid concern: they want to publish the CIFS standard and retain intellectual property rights; they want to allow implementors of the standard to be able to implement and sell or give away their implementation and/or their source code; and they want to prohibit implementors from changing the licensing terms of other bundled software components.
Whether or not this conditions is included, there's nothing a licensee can do that would affect the rights of Microsoft and its other licensees to use that specification.
Microsoft is NOT trying restrict use of CIFS.
It certainly looks like it is.
They are trying to prevent a CIFS product vendor from forcing other bundled products to adhere to the same licensing model.
But the GPL and LGPL don't do that.
I and others believe that the people who came up with this aimed to imply, falsely, that the GPL and LGPL do place restrictions on bundled software, as a justification for banning their use for software based on Microsoft specifications.
I honestly can't see what these sections are supposed to protect Microsoft from, other than fair competition.
I think Microsoft may be trying out this strategy in one relatively narrow market (CIFS, Samba, and NAS markets) - granted, Windows file+print is one of those slam-dunk areas where you can drop in a Linux replacement for departmental NT boxes and immediately free yourself from lots of MS shackles... But: presumably, what they're hoping is that when they End-Of-Life everything before XP (or the next generation after XP), and it then turns out that XP and later use an incompatible version of SMB, that everyone using Samba will be forced to revert to the official Microsoft "solution". But by then I bet Redmond Linux, Lindows, Mandrake, and the other hand-holding, plus another few years of positive comments from the ZDNet / C|Net / PCWeek type publications, will have softened up the PHBs to the idea of Linux... and lo, Microsoft's core market jumps en masse to Linux on the desktop, instead. From the PoV of said PHB's, Linux is already roughly up to the standard of NT4 (yes, of course it's much much better, but their standards are based on things like "Does it have a network neighbourhood icon? Where's my `Word'? How do I start Outlook?" - in other words, the extent to which existing OS and app functionality can be replicated, down to similar looking icons. [ Slashback: someone posted to slashdot once saying they calmed their non-tech relative's panic when they first saw a Linux desktop by simply renaming the icons "Outlook", "Internet Explorer" and so on...] )
Anyway the point I was trying to make is that this is the first new anti-Free strategy we've seen from Microsoft since FUD attacks failed so badly over the last few years. The standard Microsoft plays (FUD, buy the competitor, lock out competitor using, bankrupt, embrace-and-extend) just don't work with Free software. If this seems to knock the Free Software movement back a bit, expect to see them trying this strategy in more and more areas. Expect to see them pushing for more vigorous legal enforcement of patents, and more swingeing damages on losers in patent law-suits. Expect them to make an example of either (a) a Free software project, (b) distributors of such Free software - Red Hat, SuSE etc ; or (most likely, cos it's the most frightening to their customer base) of the USERS of such software. For example, suppose.NET server phones home when it detects a non-licensed CIFS client attempting to connect, then Microsoft automatically send out nastygrams to the users. A PHB who gets a legal threat from Microsoft would probably achieve a vertical take-off with the force with which they would shit themselves.
The only reason that NAS vendors are using CIFS is that some version of CIFS is bundled into every windows install. If Microsoft included NFS support this problem would not exist. But it is not in Microsoft's best intrests in let go of CIFS. So what is a admin to do? Well there are *lots* of nfs client implementations, but all of the ones I could find are commercial. If there was a free or open source NFS client that ran on windows (heck if it could be integrated into windows) it would be a blow against Microsoft in a big way.
NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1, Redundant)
Many manufacturers of NAS (Network Attached Storage) use GPLed OS that have been modified or reduced to their basic components to NAS appliances. I have seen many instances of Linux NAS devices, BSD NAS devices, and yes, NAS devices bases on Windows 2000 for appliances.
A little background:
A NAS device is an appliance dedicated to providing storage on the IP network. It's basically a stripped standard server with ease-of-use features added, and form-fitted into a smaller box. Extremely easy to set up, extremely easy to use.
Companies that make them:
Quantum Snap! www.quantum.com
Maxtor www.maxtor.com
Network Appliance www.netapp.com
IOMEGA www.iomega.com
Blue Arc www.bluearc.com
and the list goes on and on.
They all provide CIFS and NFS shares, some of the also provide Apple shares, and Novell shares. The point here is that many of them are based on GPLed OS. While their final product may be commercial, this development may restrict their use of CIFS. These products RELY on CIFS. Frankly this may be a ploy by Microsoft to sell more copies of Windows 2000 for Appliances, and take a heavy swipe at the Open Source community.
If NAS vendors can't use CIFS, and the latest CIFS has changed to mess up connectivity, they are dead in two years, as the OS upgrades catch up.
If there is a somebody who could clear that up a bit, that would be great.
I, for one, hope that continued compatibility for the CIFS standard continues in the Samba package. For Linux to lose that functionality, it would kill a lot of possible server implementations.
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
I believe Win2K will be THE standard MS office OS for a long, long time. So the problem you are talking about may take more than 2 years to really hit home.
Just my $0.02
MM
--
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Jason
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Not that anyone would WANT to install Windows 95 at this point...
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
MM
--
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter if it's legal or if the patent claims are valid. It's to get the CEO's of appliance companies to go into their engineering dept. and say "see, we should have licensed from Microsoft to be *safe*".
It's all about the dollars and control of the vendors........
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you meant the Microsoft Server Compliance Kit.
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Separating Interface from Implementation, Legally (Score:1)
Also, I think that BSD licences are not specifically singled out in the MS CIFS license because MS lawyers don't consider them "viral" in the above sense of having side effects on bundled software components.
It seems to me that what would be ideal is if vendors could distribute packages in which each component might have its own licensing model: some may be GPL and some may be proprietary; but each party -- creator, implementor, vendor, and end-user -- should be able to declare, discover, and protect their rights with the least amount of legal hassle. It also seems conceivable to me that GPL is not the universal answer to this ideal any more than is closed-source corporate licenses such as MS and/or current digital rights management trends. Surely there must be efforts uderway to improve/facilitate our legal options?
I certainly hope that Samba and Linux and others can implement CIFS for free or with open source. But I don't think MS is preventing this. I also don't think that they're trying to spread FUD. In fact, as someone who is at least making an effort to be a realist, it seems to me that there might be reasonable justifications for MS's viewpoint on this issue. I'm not a great legal scenario craftsman, but suppose a vendor wants to sell a reasonably priced CIFS product for Linux with an optional SLA for a particular market in which the full samba implementation is not desired for security reasons, and the GPL hindered them. Is such a scenario conceivable? I think MS is correct in asserting the non-universality of an equation like FREE = OPEN_SOURCE = GPL. Whatever their merits, they are not the same things, and licenses must be allowed to make such differentiations.
Again, I am neither a lawyer nor a polemic. I just think it's important to see the driving force behind both sides of an issue before deciding their merits. Please correct me if I have misunderstood, misrepresented or missed the real issue. And please help create a working solution to this problem by first understanding and helping others to understand the real issues.
Re:Separating Interface from Implementation, Legal (Score:1)
Re:Separating Interface from Implementation, Legal (Score:3, Informative)
Whether or not this conditions is included, there's nothing a licensee can do that would affect the rights of Microsoft and its other licensees to use that specification.
It certainly looks like it is.
But the GPL and LGPL don't do that.
I and others believe that the people who came up with this aimed to imply, falsely, that the GPL and LGPL do place restrictions on bundled software, as a justification for banning their use for software based on Microsoft specifications.
I honestly can't see what these sections are supposed to protect Microsoft from, other than fair competition.
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:2)
Anyway the point I was trying to make is that this is the first new anti-Free strategy we've seen from Microsoft since FUD attacks failed so badly over the last few years. The standard Microsoft plays (FUD, buy the competitor, lock out competitor using, bankrupt, embrace-and-extend) just don't work with Free software. If this seems to knock the Free Software movement back a bit, expect to see them trying this strategy in more and more areas. Expect to see them pushing for more vigorous legal enforcement of patents, and more swingeing damages on losers in patent law-suits. Expect them to make an example of either (a) a Free software project, (b) distributors of such Free software - Red Hat, SuSE etc ; or (most likely, cos it's the most frightening to their customer base) of the USERS of such software. For example, suppose .NET server phones home when it detects a non-licensed CIFS client attempting to connect, then Microsoft automatically send out nastygrams to the users. A PHB who gets a legal threat from Microsoft would probably achieve a vertical take-off with the force with which they would shit themselves.
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Re:NAS Vendors Effected (Score:1)
Is is possible / practical to install some kind of SAMBA client (emulate win98?) on a Win XP box?
If you can't bring SAMBA (etc) to Windows, then bring Windows to SAMBA.
Yes, I know this doesn't help the vendor much to require a client driver to be installed on 3,000 desktop machines...
XP = eXtrememly Proprietary