The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, on behalf of Samba, Signs Agreement with Microsoft

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Phil's picture

FOSSBazaar congratulates both the Samba team and Microsoft for allowing the unencumbered further development of open source software that can interoperate with the Microsoft Windows platform.

In short, the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) has been created and has signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the Microsoft protocol documentation.  The cost to PFIF was 10,000 Euros.  Members of the Samba team, and other open source developers can sign a non-disclosure agreement with PFIF and receive access to the protocol specifications.  The non-disclosure agreement does not prohibit the Samba project, or any other open source project from distributing source code constructed from information obtained by access to the protocol documentation.

There have been many articles posted about this event.  I’ve provided a couple below.  The first is from the New York Times and gives a good overview of the agreement.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-microsoft-samba-eu.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The second is from Groklaw, and provides an overview, plus a wealth of links to additional information for those that want to dig into the story more completely

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071220124013919