"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:2007-02-17
I can't see anything noteworthy. Microsoft insist that they have a number of applicable patents for which Microsoft are due a per-copy royalty. The EU caved in to Microsoft on that point even though software is not patentable in the EU.
The Samba team have obtained the specification with that per-copy royalty for applicable patents still intact. The ONLY thing that Andrew Tridgell managed to negotiate was to obtain a list from Microsoft of the patents that Microsoft believed to apply.
It is now the intent of the Samba team to implement a working and non-infringing alternative implementation. Non-infringing would mean that the Samba code is not a copy of Microsoft code (which it isn't, because Microsoft has not released any code to copy), and the Samba code does not infringe any of the methods described in Microsoft patents. Since there is always more than one method to do any given thing, this should be possible now that the Samba team knows which Microsoft patents to avoid, but there is no guarantee that they won't make a mistake, or Microsoft won't simply claim that Samba's chosen alternative method infringes anyway.
Member since:2005-07-24
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The Samba team have obtained the specification with that per-copy royalty for applicable patents still intact. The ONLY thing that Andrew Tridgell managed to negotiate was to obtain a list from Microsoft of the patents that Microsoft believed to apply.
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Incorrect. For a one time fee of 10,000, the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation can now freely redistribute the documentation to OSS projects without per copy royalties. The Samba Team cannot reistribute their copy. But any source code they, or any other OSS projects, create from the documentation is freely distributable. MS has provided a list of patents which they believe cover the protocol, and are required to keep the list up to date.
But don't just take my word for it. Listen to Jeremy Allison explain all of this:
http://tinyurl.com/2b52av
Member since:
2005-07-24
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Of course. But that's quite irrelevant to the current situation. The fact is that MS and the EC struck a deal. It's done. Over with. Get over it.
The interesting bit, at this point, is that while the terms, as spelled out in the deal, were not particularly compatible with OSS, allowing per copy royalty charges, etc., due to some pretty amazing negotiations between Andrew Tridgell and Microsoft, the documentation has been made available not just to the Samba Team, but to all open source projects under terms which are compatible with even the most stringent of OSS licenses. That MS was willing to go beyond the terms of the original deal to make that possible is more than just noteworthy.
The impact of the documentation availability to the future of OSS projects is well worth discussing. The tantalizing possibility of other MS protocols eventually being released under similar terms is worth discussing.
Why you want to go back and beat beat the dead horse of why the EC took action in the first place I've no idea.
It's time to move on and contemplate the future. Not to rehash the past... again... and again... and again.