'Samba' Networking Protocol Project Gets Big Funding from the German Sovereign Tech Fund (samba.plus) 33
Samba is "a free software re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol," according to Wikipedia. And now the Samba project "has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German Sovereign Tech Fund to advance the project," writes Jeremy Allison — Sam (who is Slashdot reader #8,157 — and also a long standing member of Samba's core team):
The investment was successfully applied for by [information security service provider] SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing Samba's security, scalability, and functionality.
The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem.
The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.
All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running and gitlab MRs will appear soon!
Back in 2000, Jeremy Allison answered questions from Slashdot readers about Samba.
Allison is now a board member at both the GNOME Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy, a distinguished engineer at Rocky Linux creator CIQ, and a long-time free software advocate.
The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem.
The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.
All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running and gitlab MRs will appear soon!
Back in 2000, Jeremy Allison answered questions from Slashdot readers about Samba.
Allison is now a board member at both the GNOME Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy, a distinguished engineer at Rocky Linux creator CIQ, and a long-time free software advocate.
Re:Is this public money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course and why not? Isn't that the whole idea? There's no reason FOSS can't also make money for VARs.
Anything that helps produce more open code is good.
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Value Added Reseller
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In addition, several articles have noted things like German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating [arstechnica.com] (April 2024) so anything that helps with Windows/Linux interoperability is probably a good thing for them. Google: german government windows linux [google.com]
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They've switched before and switched back to Windows so it's not exactly a sure bet they'll stay.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]
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That was Munich, a city in the SE of Germany and - not entirely coincidentally - where Microsoft has its German headquarters.
The State which is switching from Windows to Linux is in the far north of the country. If you look at the Arstechnica article fahrbot-bot linked to above [arstechnica.com] it specifically mentions Munich's experiences. Rather amusingly, Windows 11's hardware requirements were specifically mentioned as a m
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a perfect example of how classism has created corruption which has breed incompetence and ineffectiveness
these upper class people are good at one thing, self-indulgence
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It's GPL so you'll get the features too.
Why Samba? (Score:1)
Re:Why Samba? (Score:4, Informative)
And despite its inefficiencies it largely is used to make the world go round. What alternative do you propose? And when thinking of it think of something feature rich that is widely used and supported by every operating system as a standard way of sharing files.
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And despite its inefficiencies it largely is used to make the world go round.
You can thank Microsoft and SMB for that. Samba is a (pretty good) attempt at extending the protocol to non Windows platforms. So Windows clients don't fall on their face in corporate/enterprise networks and NT servers and controllers can be thrown out.
I worked with it many years ago. And fiddling around with a Samba server revealed how many holes the native SMB implementations on NT had.
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It's not important that it be supported by every operating system, because every other operating system supports something else. But if you have any significant number of Windows clients, you will wind up using it for sure. I haven't tried to do NFS or whatnot from a Windows machine in a long time — it used to be highly doable with commercial software, but I would rather just use SMB for them anyway so I don't have to fiddle with them.
On the other hand it's not a big deal to share the same resources o
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It's not important that it be supported by every operating system, because every other operating system supports something else.
That is mindbogglingly false when it comes to a government supporting a project in a way to achieve its own goals of internal use. The number 1 question anyone asks when investing in software is: does it fit my use case, and in that regard the German government being a large mix of Linux and Windows infrastructure absolutely needs to be focusing its funding on something that is cross platform compatible.
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That is mindbogglingly false when it comes to a government supporting a project in a way to achieve its own goals of internal use.
Your response is weird and makes it look like you forgot we were talking about a protocol and not a specific software package.
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Your response is weird and makes it look like you forgot we were talking about a protocol and not a specific software package.
Errr no, we're talking about an investment decision by the government to further their own IT goals. Whether the result is a protocol or a package is irrelevant. The point is the ${thing} needs to be actively used by the OS being run - or part of a plan for wide spread use. And given that the German government infamously runs a mix of OSes it remains a significant requirement.
Re: Why Samba? (Score:2)
I quit using Samba when I quit using Windows. I now use sshfs everywhere. I see there are sshfs clients for Windows. Maybe they can work just as well as SMB? I'm sure SSH is a more secure protocol.
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I quit using Samba when I quit using Windows.
Thanks. But but put your main character syndrome aside for a moment and tell me why the German government should make an investment decision based on which OS you run at home.
The question posed here is not what you use for file sharing, the question posed is what alternative do you propose this investment be put into for a massive government with a large mix of Windows and Linux infrastructure.
I deduct all points and award an instant fail if the answer is OneDrive ;-)
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It is not the German government. It is a government funded Program, a little parafiscus, that promotes software sovereignty.
All of this is pocket money so far. Larger investments will follow.
That does not mean that the German government uses the software. Sure it does, but that is a "different department".
Re:Why Samba? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it is. It emulates Microsoft's Active Directory domain controllers, and their clients, quite well for Linux and UNIX systems and is designed for compatibility, not efficiency. It handles CIFS for file sharing, DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, and LDAP altogether, with high availability and load balancing and backup, as an Active Directory replacement. It's very difficult to do all of those efficiently.
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According to this NFS is sluggish, SMB3 is the fastest, and even the old AFP is quite respectable.
But no one should use SMB1.
https://photographylife.com/af... [photographylife.com]
Re: Why Samba? (Score:2)
SMB1 is still good in scenarios where latency matters (ISAM databases, for example), and actually seems better in this than it's successors. When a firewall is used and local clients aren't malicious, SMB1 is safe to use.
Re:Why Samba? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ironically, it's Samba causing SMB1 to stick around. Because Samba went GPLv3 just before releasing SMB2 support, and that's poison for a lot of those cheap NAS products out there. So a lot of products that share files over a network often use the last GPLv2 version of Samba and limits it to SMB1.
Often a ton of support documents say to use their product with Windows 10 requires installing SMB1 support. Even Microsoft wants to deprecate it away and they can't because there's too many of those things out there. (MIcrosoft first offer SMB2 with Windows Vista and SMB3 with Windows 7)
Just one of the stranger things that can happen where an insecure protocol is kept around not because of Microsoft, but because of an open-source license change.
It's kind of interesting that given how SMB implementations quickly came up, no alternative really went to compete with Samba. Every large NAS vendor (Synology, QNAP, etc) has their own SMB server they wrote themserlves, Apple wrote their own SMB client and server for macOS. You'd think there would be some third party alternative that's GPLv2-ish licensed. Then again, there's probably some cheap 3rd party closed source version out there that's being used.
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> Every large NAS vendor (Synology, QNAP, etc) has their own SMB server they wrote themserlves
That's untrue. Both Synology and QNAP use Samba. QNAP contributes code and bugfixes back to samba.org (Hi Jones !).
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because windows uses it, that means 95%+ of the planet uses it in windows alone. If you add mac and linux that easily goes beyond 99%+
Smb sucks (Score:1)
Back in the 2000s at my company if anyone attempted to put SMB on the network, even by accident they’d be escorted-out-the-premises-by-security level fired instantly.
Samba Original (Score:2)
Perhaps its my old age, but I'm fairly certain the basics of Samba predate windows file share implementation.
Before windows was dominant, they were the ones forced to work interoperability.
DAP and LDAP existed before windows domains and bastardized active directory.
Re: Samba Original (Score:4, Informative)
The SMB protocol was created by IBM, and its first implementations were for MS/IBM DOS and MS/IBM OS/2. The first Windows implementation of SMB (Windows for Workgroups 3.1) didn't have to do anything special in order to be 100 percent compatible with the protocol, which was de facto owned by Microsoft at this point.
Congratulations Jeremey! (Score:2)
Public Investment pays off (Score:2)
In any case it is government pocket money.
I think we should do the same for Wine: 100 Million EUR for 10000 bugs.