Re: Commercial file-server software

From: Christopher Browne (cbbrowne_at_acm.org)
Date: 09/14/05 

Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:01:15 GMT

> What I do get from this whole thread is that nobody here knows of any
> commercial products that fit the bill. If they did, they would've
> listed them instead of asking questions. Oh well thanks anyway.

There aren't, because the "noncommercial" options have been good
enough to effectively freeze them out.

There used to be a variety of SMB products out there, most notably DEC
PathWorks; Samba turned out to be so good that it wasn't worth trying
to maintain the alternatives, because vendors essentially got pinched
from two sides:

 - Microsoft continues to sell their versions, on the "expensive" end.

   Their marketing efforts pointed at "killing UNIX(tm)" were
   reasonably successful at poisoning anyone's interest in other
   commercial SMB implementations.

 - Samba, being free of licensing charges, undercuts anyone that would
   try to compete on the basis of price.

For something to be of enough interest that it'll be more than a "bit
player" in the Linux market, it needs either:

  a) Someone seriously marketing it, or

  b) To be free.

In the case of filesystems, they *need* to be widely deployed in order
to have the diversity of testing that will allow them to be anywhere
near reliable. And there are enough people interested in there being
"libre" implementations to make it an unprofitable market for someone
planning to make money selling licenses.

You wish it were otherwise? Well, you can't always get what you
want... 

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