Want to meet four men who dared to fight MS -- and won? (Groklaw)

If you have two pieces of software that are so tightly coupled that you can't describe the protocol between them without disclosing the code in them, you have a protocol that should NEVER have been used between two machines.

> Carlo Piana: Well, basically, one of the questions the court asked is: For forcing Microsoft to release part of their communication protocols, one of the requirements is to show that a new product has been...

> Volker Lendecke: ...would be possible.

> Jeremy Allison: ...could be created. What new markets would be created.

> Carlo Piana: Exactly, and Tridgell showed this $100 piece of hardware which could be, with Samba 4, an active domain controller for $100. It would be a terriblely good achievement for technology. And that was the reason why.

Holy. @#$%.

That is what Microsoft is scared of. The small business market is the bread and butter of Microsoft... It's how they've grown. They started small and companies used their software. As these companies got bigger and more sophisticated then they continued to purchase Microsoft's bigger and more expensive stuff. It's currently were Linux is weakest at.

But this, the $100 AD controller.. this can cut the legs out from underneath their server market. Combine something like that with those ubiquitous Linux 'gateway appliances' that do email and such a small business can replace hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of Microsoft software for a 2-3 hundred dollars worth of dedicated hardware running Linux.

And after people get used to no peer-seat licensing what do you think they are going to use when they grow?

Since 1993 many companies (Sun, Novell, NetApp, IBM) filed complaints with the European Commission about Microsoft's anti-competitive practices. In 1999 an official investigation begun. They fought for many years. In 2004 the Commission found Microsoft guilty and imposed several remedies; the important one for us is that they should publish the specifications for its server protocols.

As time went by the rest of the companies took Microsoft's money and run, for an estimated 3.5 billion dollars. Yet four guys representing two rogue organizations (Samba and FSF Europe, plus Jeremy Allison from Google) continued with it; now they have seen to the conclusion of the first appeal in a court of law, and the court has upheld the decision. They declare in the interview that they are aware of the enormous volume of work still necessary until Microsoft publishes anything in a usable form, but this is a very good start.

There is an amusing account of how Microsoft tried to use patents at some point:

Georg Greve: [...] my favorite patent involved in the whole damn thing was when they said they had all this documentation about how all this worked, the interoperability information, but these were like, I don't know, what was it, sixty four thousand pages or something? Like, an insane amount of pages apparently necessary to generate that specification, and then they said "Oh, by the way, we don't think anyone can read this unless they have sorted it in the right way" -- there was a special sorting for this information -- "and by the way, that method? We've patented it". (laughter) So if you want to read that that, you have to get the patent license on the method of sorting the information.