"The Samba team will soon get the fruits of the EU antitrust suit against Microsoft. Samba is software which allows an operating system to communicate with Microsoft Windows shared folders and printers over a network. The network protocols Microsoft uses are secret and had to be determined by Samba programmers by listening on the wire to see what Microsoft’s proprietary software would do given a particular input. Microsoft had to be forced to produce the documentation for various network protocols they use..."

A partly Microsoft-derived entity harms Samba by taking its work and making it more Microsoft obedient

The Samba development team has just announced the release of Samba 4.0. Samba is a Free Softwareimplementation of SMB/CIFS protocols, which makes it possible for any system running Samba to function as a file, print and authentication server suite for Microsoft Windows and UNIX-like clients.

I don’t mind a little cynicism — it’s a natural and only mildly toxic byproduct of paying attention. So last week, when Microsoft’s Office Open XML file format was rejected as an international standard, I wasn’t bothered that Microsoft said it was “extremely delighted” by the result.

Instead of ignoring open source conferences, Microsoft continues to invade them. The latest example: John Frederiksen (pictured), general manager of Microsoft’s Response Point business, is scheduled to speak at Digium AsteriskWorld on February 3. Why is Microsoft paying such close attention to an event for open source IP PBX advocates? The answer is obvious.

Samba project leader Jeremy Allison has accused Microsoft of trying to prevent people using and distributing software under the GNU General Public Licence, by forcing cross-patent licensing deals.

A complicated third-party arrangement means that the open-source Samba project will be able to make use of proprietary documents describing Microsoft file-sharing software.

Samba, governed by the General Public License (GPL), lets Unix or Linux servers behave like Windows machines used to share files over a network and control networked printers. But the effort has been difficult: Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to share the details of the protocols; patent infringement concerns also have appeared more than once.

A look back at the history of Samba and Microsoft suggests that Microsoft might be exploiting Novell and Mono

FSFE's role in the antitrust case was to ensure that free software developers would be able to use any interoperability information that Microsoft would be forced to publish. After 5 years of work, the last court case was won last year.