"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:2005-07-06
The fancy bits being a home domain controller, with all the nice backup and remote access tools 
(PS - I'm an 150k+ user AD design guy as a day job)
Interesting comment over at Neowin, reproduced below:
According to this report [1] (which references a Groklaw analysis), the Samba team apparently paid the 10,000 Euro fee to license the documentation. The documentation cannot be redistributed, but this allows the Samba team to see the specifics of SMB, and to code to match it. Importantly, it also seems to detail the patents that apply, so the Samba team can likewise write code that does not infringe on Microsoft's patents.
And, if you recall, Ballmer has been pretty noisy over the past 3 months or so about Linux infringing on patents.
Seems like Microsoft is being forced to provide information on these patents (if only by paying for protocol documentation), which will lessen the unspecific FUD that Microsoft is able to spread by claiming general patent liabilities in Linux.
[1] - http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/the_first...
Member since:2006-09-30
Member since:
2006-09-24
You obviously don't have much experience with samba if you think it's only function is serving files. Domain controller/participant, print sharing, etc. It does a heckofalot for a reverse engineered piece of software.