According to the Samba project web site, Samba is an open source/free software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Unlike other implementations of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol (such as LM Server for HP-UX, LAN Server for OS/2, or VisionFS), Samba (along with its source code) is freely available (at no cost to the end user), and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows/Unix/Linux clients.
For these reasons, Samba is the preferred solution for a file server in networks where different operating systems (other than Linux) coexist – the most common setup being the case of multiple Microsoft Windows clients accessing a Linux server where Samba is installed, which is the situation we are going to deal with in this article.
Source: How to set up a Samba file server to use with Windows clients – Xmodulo
