SAMBA

While this documentation is primarily concerned with protocols rather than implementations; there is one implementation that deserves special mention. A project has been established to provide free implementations of the SMB protocol and file and printing sharing facilities for various platforms. More information can be found about the SAMBA project at the web site: www.samba.org

SAMBA is freely available for very many platforms and has thus provided a means for file and print sharing between different platforms and Operating Systems. The SAMBA project has had to "reverse engineer" the protocols and continues to work in this manner in order to keep the software free.

Despite having released a version of SMB to the X-Open organization, Microsoft continues to develop the protocol as a proprietary protocol and details of some of the more recent versions have not been made freely available.