It just feels wrong that SMB has become the de-facto universal file share protocol. For the most part this seems to work, with the ability to mount SMB shares on FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Linux (and probably many others). But it still feels plain wrong. With WebDAV support in the last few versions of Windows I’m very tempted to think that WebDAV should be heavily pushed as the new universal file share protocol. Both Linux (davfs) and Mac OS X support mounting WebDAV shares and I’d expect that it wouldn’t be too hard to have it supported in FreeBSD and other un*x systems. Serving WedDAV shares already works on all systems that support Apache 2 (and Apache 1.x with mod_webdav) and IIS on Windows.
This would require some other changes though. Permissions would no longer be in the filesystem that the share resides on, it would be in .htaccess (or equivalent). I’m sure there are more efficient ways than HTTP to transfer data, but if performance was good enough then trading off efficiency for simplicity and ease would be worth it. Security of the file share is easily addressed with the addition of SSL on WebDAV shares. This would encrypt data as well as authentication for the shares. Being able to open up firewalls for remote share access would be easy and could even be moved to another port besides 80 or 443. For that matter a firewall could implement port knocking and only open up the webdav share after the correct knock had been given.
Samba has done a great job of bringing file share serving to non-Windows systems, but that doesn’t change the fact that they will always be chasing Microsoft in one form or another. An open protocol (like WebDAV) could bring to file shares the same sort of level playing ground that HTTP brought to web servers in the first place.