SerNet GmbH, a German company specializing in providing services and support for open-source software with a particular focus on Samba, has secured substantial funding of €688,800 from the German Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), Open Source’s great friend and supporter to advance the Samba project.
After providing €1 million to the GNOME Project at the end of last year, investing €203K in GStreamer and €157K in FFmpeg earlier this year, and recently €686K to FreeBSD, the company is now making another impressive donation to the open-source ecosystem, specifically, the Samba Project.
For those unfamiliar with Samba, it is vital open-source software with more than 30 years of history. The SMB protocol enables identity and access management (IAM) and seamless interoperability (file sharing) between Windows, Linux, and Unix systems. The last stable version, 4.21, was recently released. Now, back to the topic.
Due to this service contract, over the next 18 months, Samba core developers will tackle 17 key milestones across six target groups, aiming to enhance Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.
Specifically, the project will focus on transparent failover, SMB3 UNIX extensions, 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 sovereign IT infrastructures—seeking independence from proprietary software regimes while maintaining optimal interoperability.
Following the contract signing, development work began as early as September 1 and is expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all milestones. Work results will be uploaded to the public Samba software repositories immediately after completing milestones and tests.
Finally, we only specify that the connection between SerNet and Samba is significant due to several key factors:
- Core Developers: SerNet employs developers of the official Samba Team. These experts contribute directly to the development, maintenance, and enhancement of the Samba software.
- Code Contributions: The company actively contributes code, patches, and new features to the Samba project, helping to advance its capabilities and reliability.
- Commercial Support: SerNet offers professional support services for organizations using Samba. This includes assistance with installation, configuration, troubleshooting, and optimization tailored to enterprise environments.
- SAMBA+ Packages: The company provides precompiled SAMBA+ packages and optimized and tested versions of Samba for various (mainly) Enterprise Linux distros, such as RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Oracle Linux, Debian/Ubuntu, etc.
For more information, visit the SerNet’s announcement. The STF website is expected to post more information about the investment shortly.
