Coffs Free and Open Technology Network

If anybody knows how to regard the claims of commitment to standards and interoperability that come from proprietary software vendors, it's Jeremy Allison. Jeremy is a key member of the Samba team, whose software makes it possible for other operating systems to communicate with computers running Microsoft Windows using Microsoft's Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol. The name of this technology, rebranded in 1996 from the more descriptive but less Orwellian "Server Message Block", is misleading in two out of three possible ways. It is technically a file system, but it can't be described as common, as only one organisation has all the information necessary to fully implement it, and nobody uses it to tranfer data over the Internet, for a number of very good reasons. Jeremy notes that despite early emphatic assurances from Microsoft that CIFS sould indeed be common and freely usable by all...

"Once [CIFS competitor] Netware was defeated by Windows NT, their attitudes changed, and the flow of information stopped. Proprietary modifications to core protocols [...] followed, and these changes were treated as trade secrets, patented if possible, and only released under restrictive non-disclosure agreements, if released at all."

Jeremy examines Microsoft's recent attempt to have it's new MS Office file format "fast tracked" as an ISO standard in the light of their past performance on standardisation and interoperability. For anybody considering sinking their valuable data into the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) black hole, he recalls Einstein's warning that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."