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

Re:Admiration

[ComputerSlicer23]

You should get out in the world more. $2/gal is pretty darn cheap worldwide (I know it's lots more expensive in Europes, I'm fairly sure it's more expensive in the Middle East). In fact, gas isn't currently more then 66% of the way to it's peak price accounting for inflation in the U.S.

Name three liquids besides water that you can get cheaper?

Gas is one of the worlds cheapest liquids period. Other then tap water, nothing even comes close (or it didn't until the recent run up in price). I still think a gallon of milk is about 2.50-3.00 (I don't pay any attention to the price, but I pretty sure it's over $2/gal). Pretty much anything else is more expensive by the gallon. Cleaners, Juice, heck even lots of bottled water is more expensive, soda is generally more expensive. Gas is cheap. Call me when it hit's $4-$5/gal. Then you might have a point. The problem with gas prices is that the U.S. Economy is so incredibly sensitive to it's price. Simple stuff like agriculture, is something like 90% based on the price of gas (between the fertilizers, transportation, and actual farm equipment, 90% of the costs come down to how much gas does it take to do that step). It'd be even cheaper without the taxes (I believe it's like 35-50% of the price of gas where I live is pretty much taxes).

Kirby

Re:Admiration

[Progman3K]

>Gas is one of the worlds cheapest liquids period. Other then tap water, nothing even comes close (or it didn't until the recent run up in price). I still think a gallon of milk is about 2.50-3.00

Only nobody drinks 40 gallons of milk per week...