Microsoft Does Samba

No, not the dance, although I'm sure Steve Ballmer would love something to replace the Monkey Boy Dance video on YouTube. I'm talking this time about the Open Source Samba software that connects non-Microsoft computers to Microsoft shared folders and vice versa. Look for improved storage appliances soon.

The deal announced in this article describes how the Open Source community will receive “full protocol documentation for everything involved with creating a workgroup server.” Today, all the various Linux servers and storage appliances have to reverse-engineer, or rather monitor the network protocol behavior, of Windows shared storage to create client and server implementation. Now they'll have the official Microsoft documentation, which should help quite a bit.

Thank your European friends for this “holiday gift” from Microsoft, because the European Union does much more for Open Source software and to monitor and control Microsoft's proven monopolistic business practices than any government entity in the US. So call someone in Europe and say thanks.

While Microsoft might take three years to incorporate new code like this into a product or two, I'm betting the Open Source community starts updating products in about three months. Look for easier Linux to PC connections in short order. Some Linux distributions lag way behind Windows in shared folder access speed, and I hope this evens performance levels a bit.