Analysis of MS Settlement & What It Means for Samba

[Warren Togami]

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-11-06-005-20-OP-MS

Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell: Analysis of the MS Settlement and What It
Means for Samba.
Nov 6, 2001, 08 :28 UTC


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.