[ Thanks to Jeremy
Allison for this link. ]
“Microsoft announced an “olive branch” to the EU last week, by
offering to document the interfaces to its file and print server
protocols. But the offer is less generous than it appears.“Eurocrats may not be pleased to discover that these CIFS
protocols – which are considered undocumentable by developers who
work with them–were due to be published anyway, as part of a
two-year project which involved Microsoft’s co-operation.“Microsoft’s CIFS, or Common Internet File System, protocols are
better known by their former name SMB. The CIFS moniker is
misleading: it’s not a file system, and it has little to do with
the Internet. (SMB is a subset of CIFS). But it is the way that
Microsoft has implemented file sharing and network printing since
the OS/2 LAN Manager days…”