Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 21st Dec 2007 21:29 UTC, submitted by diegocg
"Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba. Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit, after losing their appeal against that decision on September 17th 2007."
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Member since:
2005-07-08
That's not true. Microsoft developers are plenty smart. It's just that the proprietary software development model tends to trade productivity, agility, performance, complexity, and cost in exchange for the assurances of centralized management.
The free software ecosystem is what happens to software development when you (largely) eliminate the managers and let the developers manage themselves. There are disadvantages to this model, but free software licensing provides a mechanism for mitigating ineffective project management to a certain extent.