Law

I participated in many battles directly against Microsoft in the Ballmer era, 1998-2014. Every Samba feature release seemed to further anger Microsoft. Copyright and then especially patents were weaponised, and highly-skilled technical marketing teams spread confusion and intimidated their own (Microsoft’s!) customers if they considered adding Samba compatibility to their IT. In the Nadella era from 2014 to now, Microsoft and other tech giants are using even more brutal ways including paracopyright, technical protection measures and the Unitary Patent System to coerce governments and their citizens. ...

In 2014, Microsoft got a new CEO and dramatically changed course from explicit hostility to embracing open source. The battleground is now [about paracopyright and preventing non-US cloud](/articles/software-patents-tpm-paracopyright) but it has its roots in the great open source IP battles of the 21st century. This timeline covers the period when Microsoft decided free software and Samba in particular was an existential threat. Microsoft often buried competitors in expensive litigation, 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 over thirty years old and has conservatively a billion users. Samba started when I got upset at Microsoft for trying to monopolise all computer networking at the University of South Australia in 1993. 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. ...

Adversarial interoperability… Here is the history of our project Samba as it stood in the Adversarial Interoperability ↗ days, recorded in the file history.txt from the Samba source code tree ↗. In the 1990s Microsoft was one of the earliest tech monopolies, and when working in IT at the University of South Australia I saw first-hand the harm being done. I was quite passionate in 1993, according to my co-founder’s statement below. Later, in the dot-com boom days I wrote the first Windows replacement paper. Recently I made a timeline of battles lost and won. ...