samba - Nov 2001 - Analysis of the Microsoft Settlement from a Samba perspective.

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.