"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!"