Microsoft's Slap at Samba

Rollie Hawk writes "Microsoft's latest attempt to reconcile with the European Commission's antitrust rulings against the company may result in another victim. It seems their offer, if accepted, will strike a considerable blow at a leading competitor in the realm of file and printer sharing. The popular open source suite Samba stands to be the recipient of a backhanded slap from Redmond if the offer stands and the European branch of the Free Software Foundation is taking it personally. Though Microsoft is offering to make some information regarding interoperability available to competitors, it's only under the condition that implementations are not open source. According to FSFE president Georg Greve, "the proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a free software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software." How is Samba being specifically targeted? Greve argues this is because "Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market.""

Comments

Sure

[The Bungi]

And maybe The US government can talk to Airbus about releasing some of their proprietary secrets to Boeing. Sounds like that would be a good deal.

Whatever else, this stupid meddling and back and forth by the EU (give us your netowrking protocols, IP be dammed! no, you can't ship an OS with a media player, RealNetworks will get an ulcer! we rock!) is going to come back and bite them one of these days.

Re:So what?

[goldspider]

And whose rights is Microsoft violating? Are people/companies free to release their code under whatever conditions they please, but only as long as they placate those who feel entitled to a portion of the profit?

You just go ahead and try to take someone to court based on a breach of an ambiguous, un-written, un-signed "social" contract. I wish you luck with that.