I mentioned in an earlier post to my weblog, that a good way to judge the results in the proposed settlement with Microsoft would be to look at its effect on the development of Samba. If Samba becomes more interoperable with Microsoft operating systems as a result Microsoft revealing the APIs and protocols used in their "middleware", then the settlement could be considered at least somewhat successful. If not, then clearly the settlement should be considered unsuccessful. Now we see the tricks from Microsoft that we could have easily anticipated. First, there are lots of conditions attached to the specs, that make the Samba project ineligible. The worst condition is that the GPL is prohibited. Second, as reported by the Samba team, the spec for CIFS released by Microsoft is away out of date. See the discussion on Slashdot.
Posted by Doug Sauder at April 30, 2002 07:55 AM