Samba project receives funding from Sovereign Tech Fund

The open source project Samba has received funding of 688,800 euros from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF). The money will be used to pay Samba developers to implement 17 milestones in six categories over the next 18 months to improve the security, scalability and functionality of Samba.

The planned improvements include transparent failover, SMB3 UNIX extensions and modern protocols such as SMB over QUIC. SMB over QUIC is intended to make SMB operation over VPNs more robust; it will be generally available with the upcoming Windows Server 2025. The STF-funded development work has already begun and is expected to be completed by the end of February 2026. After completion of each milestone, a report will document the results. The resulting code will flow into the public Samba repositories after completion and testing.

As an open source implementation of the SMB protocol, Samba enables identity and access management as well as interoperability between Windows, Linux and Unix systems. The money for the Samba grant was applied for by SerNet, a leading Samba service provider from Germany, which employs several Samba developers. The Sovereign Tech Fund is a federal government funding program for the development of open digital infrastructures, the strengthening of the open source ecosystem and the promotion of digital sovereignty. Most recently, the foundation launched a funding program for maintainers of open source projects and supported the Gnome project with one million euros.

(odi)