samba - Sep 2024 - Samba secures funding from Sovereign Tech Fund

Hello Sambaistas!

Some of you have already noticed the exciting news that I'd like to 
hereby share with all of you:

The Samba project has secured significant funding [1] from the German 
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was 
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba 
developers from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed 
at enhancing Samba?s security, scalability, and functionality.

The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program 
that supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open 
digital infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open 
source ecosystem. [2]

The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 
UNIX extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols 
such as SMB over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that 
Samba remains a robust and secure solution for organizations that rely 
on a sovereign IT infrastructure. Development work began as early as 
September the 1st and is expected to be completed by the end of February 
2026 for all subprojects.

All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba 
development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running 
[4] and gitlab MRs will appear soon!

With a great development team, I am looking forward to significantly 
improving Samba over the next 18 months and can't wait to see the 
feature in the hands of our users!

Cheers!
-slow

[1] <https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech/samba>
[2] <https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/>
[3] 
<https://www.sernet.de/en/news/news-detail/sovereign-tech-fund-invests-in-samba-project>
[4] <https://gitlab.com/samba-team/devel/samba/-/pipelines/1446299673>

-- 
SerNet Samba Team Lead https://sernet.de/
Samba Team Member      https://samba.org/
SAMBA+ packages       https://samba.plus/

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On 13/09/24 02:43, Ralph Boehme via samba-technical
wrote:
> Hello Sambaistas!
> 
> Some of you have already noticed the exciting news that I'd like to 
> hereby share with all of you:
> 
> The Samba project has secured significant funding [1] from the German 
> Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was 
> successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba 
> developers from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed 
> at enhancing Samba?s security, scalability, and functionality.
This is great news. Congratulations Ralph and others involved.

Douglas

On 9/12/24 9:43 AM, Ralph Boehme via samba wrote:
> With a great development team, I am looking forward to significantly
improving
> Samba over the next 18 months and can't wait to see the feature in the
hands
> of our users!
Congratulations to a truly deserving group of talented developers!

FOSS project funding is always a challenge and there are always more needs 
than haves.

That doesn't mean I'll retire my Samba T-shirt just yet, "Opening
windows to a
wider world" was quite a catchy slogan...

And many thanks to the sound decision making within the STF, they have made a 
good investment in a valued project with an incredible track record. I
haven't
seen it all, but have enjoyed watching the project grow from the 1.8 -> 2.0.2
days.

Let the good work continue.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.