Samba

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The Samba Project is nearly 30 years old,

Samba is a story of reverse engineering, IP rights, threats, cybersecurity, court cases, lawyers and engineering excellence. I was a co-founder of Samba because I needed it to solve a problem I had. I could see that there was a bright future for something that could be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft network servers, and some talented engineers agreed with me. It was an interesting ride for many years!

Samba continues, and there is much to impress. Samba has perhaps around a billion users due to its inclusion in many embedded devices, and is the second implementation of Active Directory after Microsoft's implementation. Samba Team engineers continue to release reliable code, with a core team of about 30 members funded by many companies.

Samba has also fallen far short of its promise to be a drop-in replacement, which would have made it ubiquitous in every company in the world and a very different story for Microsoft and Amazon's hybrid cloud solutions. The time for that has now been and gone, and the reasons are instructive.

Part of this shortfall stems from the social and psychological difficulty of turning a reverse engineering project into forwards engineering, once full documentation for the SMB protocols became available following Microsoft's loss in court. The architectural possibilities are very different and the development cadence should have reflected that. Another part of the shortfall stems from the Samba Team being disinterested a decade ago in the idea of replacing Microsoft servers in the cloud.