A More Open Microsoft

I read the first two paragraphs and then skimmed the rest, I may have missed it. But he never mentions that MS is only offering this because the lost their anti-trust case in the EU and couldn't get out of doing it. To me that doesn't make MS more open, that makes them following the rules, after paying millions of dollars in fines to avoid doing it.

Oh well, we can't expect complete coverage when someone reports the news now can we.

The article also missed what I think is equally important- none of this would be happening at all without FOSS, and without all the mouthy FOSS geeks who have been speaking out on these issues for years. Pretty amazing how a bunch of unwashed hippies can force the biggest gorilla to dance to a different tune.

You missed it: "Of course, it helps that the full weight of both the US and European legal systems have been pestering them for the past several years, but it is nice to see some results other than the ability to uninstall IE from Windows and have some minor fines paid (minor in terms of Microsoft's daily cash intake, that is.)"

Not a bad summary of changes Microsoft has made regarding third-parties although some of it is specific to third-party Windows apps.

But the story gives no credit to FOSS activists- how the efforts of the Samba team and the Software Freedom Law Center resulted in the creation of the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, as well as this particular agreement.

http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/ http://www.protocolfreedom.org/ http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/PFIF_history.html

The last link gives the most information; it's Andrew Tridgell's write up of events.

He mentions "Samba had to resort to some clever programming tricks to stay on top of changes to these protocols" but didn't characterize it as reverse engineering.

OK -

Why the hell does anybody care why?

If theres' something good to exploit, it should be exploited.

dino, it isn't the "why" in itself, it's credit where credit is due. Microsoft wasn't being as magnanimous as some of their media fanbois want to claim.

>it's credit where credit is due.

So long as that's what it is.

In a twist on "Living well is the best revenge", sticking it to Microsoft with their own stuff would be a wonderful thing to do.