This timeline covers the period when Microsoft decided free software and Samba in particular was an exisential threat. Microsoft often buried competitors in expensive legislation, but turned out to be much more difficult to bury open source like Samba . This was the Ballmer era, named after the then-CEO, and the history of Samba’s triumphs feels highly relevant to 2026 where other giant companies seek to prevent the rise of open source competitors. ...
In 2026, the Samba Project ↗ is nearly 30 years old and has conservatively a billion users. Samba started when I got upset at Microsoft for trying to monopolise all computer networking. I discovered some unmaintained but interesting open source software for sharing files and printers with workstation computers. And the rest is the official Samba history . Samba is implemented by talented software engineers with a very large number of total contributors. I was (and remain) most interested in interoperability architecture and design, why these things are needed and make sense to users. Plus some protocol analysis, for example, technical readers may know the NTLMv2 encryption scheme was tricky, but turned out to be the same as used in the NTFS filesystem - NTLM is deprecated in favour of Kerberos now ↗ but those were the days. I wrote How to Replace Windows NT with Linux , explaining protocol-first strategies for removing Microsoft software. ...