The Samba Team would welcome Microsoft documenting its
proprietary server protocols. Unfortunately this isn’t what the
settlement stipulates. The settlement states :
“E. Starting nine months after the submission of this
proposed Final Judgment to the Court, Microsoft shall make
available for use by third parties, for the sole purpose of
interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product, on
reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (consistent with Section
III.I), any Communications Protocol that is, on or after the date
this Final Judgment is submitted to the Court, (i) implemented in a
Windows Operating System Product installed on a client computer,
and (ii) used to interoperate natively (i.e., without the addition
of software code to the client or server operating system products)
with Windows 2000 Server or products marketed as its successors
installed on a server computer. “
Sounds good for Samba, doesn’t it. However, in the “Definition
of terms” section it states :
“Communications Protocol” means the set of rules for
information exchange to accomplish predefined tasks between a
Windows Operating System Product on a client computer and Windows
2000 Server or products marketed as its successors running on a
server computer and connected via a local area network or a wide
area network. These rules govern the format, semantics, timing,
sequencing, and error control of messages exchanged over a network.
Communications Protocol shall not include protocols used to
remotely administer Windows 2000 Server and products marketed as
its successors. “
If Microsoft is allowed to be the interpreter of this document,
then it could be interpreted in a very broad sense to explicitly
exclude the SMB/CIFS protocol and all of the Microsoft RPC calls
needed by any SMB/CIFS server to adequately interoperate with
Windows 2000. They would claim that these protocols are used by
Windows 2000 server for remote administration and as such would not
be required to be disclosed. In that case, this settlement would
not help interoperability with Microsoft file serving one bit, as
it would be explicitly excluded.
We would hope that a more reasonable interpretation would allow
Microsoft to ensure the security of its products, whilst still
being forced to fully disclose the fundamental protocols that are
needed to create interoperable products.
The holes in this document are large enough for any competent
lawyer to drive several large trucks through. I assume the DoJ
lawyers didn’t get any technical advice on this settlement as the
exceptions are cleverly worded to allow Microsoft to attempt to
evade any restrictions in previous parts of the document.
Microsoft has very competent lawyers, as this weakly worded
settlement by the DoJ shows. It is to be hoped the the European
Union investigators are not so easily fooled as the USA.
A secondary problem is the definition of “Reasonable and
non-Discriminatory” (RAND) licensing terms. We have already seen
how such a term could damage the open implementation of the
protocols of the Internet. If applied in the same way here, Open
Source/Free Software products would be explicitly excluded.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Andrew Tridgell,
Samba Team.