Chapter 3. A Tale of Two Standards

Jeremy Allison

It was the best of protocols, it was the worst of protocols, it was the age of monopoly, it was the age of Free Software, it was the epoch of openness, it was the epoch of proprietary lock-in, it was the season of GNU, it was the season of Microsoft, it was the spring of Linux, it was the winter of Windows....

Samba is commonly used as the "glue" between the separate worlds of Unix and Windows, and because of that, Samba developers have to intimately understand the design and implementation decisions made in both systems. It is no surprise that Samba is considered one of the most difficult Free Software projects to understand and to join, outclassed in complexity only by the voodoo black art of Linux kernel development. Samba really isn't that hard, however, once you look at the different standards implemented in the two systems (although some of the decisions in Windows can cause raised eyebrows).

In developing Samba, we're creating a bridge between the most popular standards currently deployed in the computing world: the Unix/Linux standard of POSIX and the Microsoft-developed de facto standard of Win32. In this chapter, I will examine these two standards from an application programmer's perspective. In doing so, I thought it might be instructive to look at the reasons why each of them exists, what the intention for creating the particular standard might have been, and how well they have stood the test of time and the needs of programmers. A historical perspective is very important, as we look to the future and decide what standards we should encourage governments and businesses to support, and what effect this will have on the software landscape in the early 21st century.

Standard: (noun) A flag, banner, or ensign, especially. An emblem or flag of an army, raised on a pole to indicate the rallying point in battle.^[1]

^[1] http://www.dictionary.com.