Boris Popov wrote the SMBFS client filesystem for FreeBSD. For some reason (probably because he saw it on the wire during testing) he decided to include the "Samba" dialect in the protocol negotiation, even though his code is not derived from Samba. Apple later collaborated with Boris, and adopted his code for use with MacOSX.

As a result, current versions (as of February 2004) of FreeBSD and the MacOSX SMB client both send the "Samba" dialect string even though they are not Samba derivatives.