[Sussex] Europe is finaly going to fine M$

[Andrew Guard]

Steven Dobson wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 00:24 +0100, John Crowhurst wrote:
>> On Tue, June 27, 2006 12:59, Andrew Guard wrote:
>>> At long last Europe is going to enforce there E2 a day fine!
>>>
>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5120536.stm
>> I wish they were looking into more of the anti-competitive measures
>> Microsoft have been spinning and set the fine to a much better Euro$20M a
>> day. Euro$2M is a gnat's bite to such a company.
> 
> But from the BBC article Microsoft is having to comply with the ruling
> in full.  They are now complaining that producing all that documentation
> means that they have to give away "trade secrets".
> 

  > I recall that Microsoft a while back started to release source under the
> pretext that "source code offers the best documenation of what the code
> does".  This was rejected by the EU.  Microsoft had placed some kind of
> anti-FLOSS license around their source code stopping FLOSS projects from
> use it.  I don't think you can (or that the EU would allow) that kind of
> restriction around documentation.  If you look at the SCO v IBM case the
> publication of books about the internals of the Unix kernel is just one
> of the defences IBM is using.  While the text clearly remains under
> copyright, the ideas, methods and concepts a book discusses are placed
> in the Public Domain.

I agree there is world of diffrance between source code and documention 
of a protocol.  First you would have to decipher what the code is doing 
and why it doing it, that not as easy as it sounds.
> 
> The Samba project was closly involved in Microsoft's anti-trust case and
> will benefit greatly from the technical details of the SMB protocol
> Microsoft will now have to published.  It will make is much, much easier
> to develop software that works with Window's servers and workstations.
> This is the real fine in my eyes.  This is what I believe will hurt
> Microsoft the most.

It could give Microsoft more problems then just that by them being 
forced in to making such document public they will have stick to letter 
of document.  In other words Microsoft will NOT be able to change the 
protocol just to make others to break.
Now here an idea that is out of the box what if you deiced not to use 
Microsoft version of SMB but the samba SMB on windows systems as you 
trust it more.

-- 

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