Five years ago, the complaint against Microsoft brewing before the European Court of First Instance was that it was not contributing enough knowledge about Windows' source code to let others develop services for it. That didn't make sense to the European Commission, which openly asked, what good is an operating system if it doesn't operate anything except itself?
Microsoft Finally Contributed Code to Samba Open Source Interop Project
Yesterday, the
organization responsible for the Free Software-licensed system of file
and print services called Samba - the group that had helped keep
Microsoft in court for over six years - acknowledged that a distribution
that showed up in Samba's respositories on October 11 contained
interoperability code for Windows from Microsoft itself.
"A
few years back, a patch submission from coders at Microsoft would have
been amazing to the point of unthinkable, but the battles are mostly
over and times have changed," wrote Samba's Chris Sertel yesterday.
"We still disagree on some things such as the role of software patents
in preventing the creation of innovative software; but Microsoft is now
at the forefront of efforts to build a stronger community and
improve interoperability in the SMB world."
improve interoperability in the SMB world."
The change from both sides
"Disagree"
is a noticeable toning down from the language Samba employed in its
original objections to Microsoft's business conduct. Sensing a
conspiracy to neutralize competition, five years ago next week, Samba
published a condemnation of Microsoft's patent covenant deal
with Novell. Alleging the deal was an attempt to divide Free Software
proponents from the sources of commercial software that may eventually
become free, the Samba team wrote, "The GPL [General Public License]
makes it clear that all distributors of GPL'd software must stand
together in the fight against software patents. Only by standing
together do we stand a chance of defending against the peril represented
by software patents. With this agreement Novell is attempting to
destroy that unified defense, exchanging the long term interests of the
entire Free Software community for a short term advantage for Novell
over their competitors." Novell had distributed its version of the Linux kernel under the GPL established by the Free Software Foundation.
The current version of the GPL
makes no such imposition on licensees to stand up against software
patents in general, but rather stipulates that the contributor to the
licensed software may not impose any patents rights it may have against
any user of the software.
The long, long fine
After Microsoft was found guilty of abuse of dominant power
in September 2007, it was ordered to freely disclose interoperability
code, and to regularly communicate how it was complying with that order
with the aid of an appointed monitoring trustee. By March 2009, the EC determined that Microsoft was sharing enough code to render the need for the trustee unnecessary.
But
a fine of nearly €900 million hung over Microsoft in the interim, and
last May, the company's objection to the fine was heard. A final ruling
on that fine is forthcoming.
Responding to that objection, Samba
creator Andrew Tridgell was quoted as saying that while Microsoft had
publicly published certain elements of its interoperability code, it had
withheld certain mundane parts of the code that the company claimed
should be licensed to others only for a fee.
"There is nothing innovative here," Free Software Foundation Europe quotes Tridgell as saying.
"All the innovative bits are either already published by Microsoft's
own researchers, or are contained in the Microsoft program source code -
and we have no interest in seeing that. The innovation certainly isn't
in the protocol specifications."
The fact that the withheld portion of the code was indeed mundane was actually the subject of a 2007 EC objection, which proposed that no company should be allowed to charge money for something that isn't unique and worthy of protection.
Thursday
evening, a Microsoft spokesperson provided RWW with this statement:
"The patch to the Samba code enables Linux clients to better
interoperate with Microsoft Windows in mixed source environments.
Contributed under GPL 2+, the patch is an individual contribution made
by Stephen Zarkos in line with Samba policies in place at the time."
In introducing his contribution to Samba on October 10, Zarkos wrote the following for the contributors' mailing list:
Earlier this year we had an intern working with us to implement a proof of concept for extended protection (channel and service binding) for Firefox and Samba. To enable this scenario on the client side, we were able to use libraries available on Windows and contribute code to the Mozilla team to make this all work. On the Linux side, however, Firefox utilizes Samba for NTLM authentication and so he also built some patches for Samba to enable this scenario.These patches have been approved for release as 'GPLv2 or later' and copyright has been assigned to me (just like our build farm patches earlier). My only concern is that these patches may be bit stale and may need some work. Hopefully they are still useful to you and are not so huge that you can see what he was trying to do.
Samba's Chris Hertel, at least,
saw the contribution as significant, and noted the seismic shift in the
landscape in five years' time: "Most people didn't even notice the
source of the contribution. That's how far things have come in the past
four-ish years," he wrote, "but some of us saw this as a milestone, and
wanted to make a point of expressing our appreciation for the patch and
the changes we have seen."
