Commercial organization suckage wrt Samba

[Richard Sharpe]

Hmmm, 

Luke referred to commercial organizations sucking off of the Samba effort
and giving nothing in return.

I have been contacted by various people over the last twelve months.  Said
people have all been trying to implement various forms of SMB server,
mostly for embedding in printers.

None of them have come bearing gifts, and seemed to simply want to suck off
of the effort I have put into learning about the SMB protocol and the Samba
source code.  None have offered pizzas, tools, knowledge, etc, in return,
at least not to my knowledge.

This last one seems to take the cake.

It would seem that Texas Instruments, if that who ti.com is, is wanting to
build an SMB capable printer.  They seem to have subcontracted the work to
their Indian Development Branch.

I got an EM from a very imperious fellow who want to know all sorts of
things.  I was busy at the time giving courses and working on more decoding
of the SMB protocol in Ethereal, so I did not reply. 

A few days later, I got an even more imperious message from this fellow
saying that he was waiting for my reply.  I refrained from sending back
that I was waiting for some money, and pointed out that the info he needed
was in Ethereal and Samba, and, but for the want of a clue (converting HEX
to Decimal), he would have stumbled over it :-)  I did however object to
being asked to do, for no recompense, the work he was being paid for.

It seems that this fellow was non-plussed, and today I got an EM from one
of his compatriots in the US.  This EM was much more pleasantly
constructed, but still asking for the same info, and likewise, sans gifts :-(

I provided more clues.

However, it would appear that the world is full of people who want others
to do their work for them.

So endeth my gripe for the day.

Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, sharpe at ns.aus.com, Master Linux Administrator :-),
Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.zing.org)
Co-author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
Author: First Australian 5-day, intensive, hands-on Linux SysAdmin course