New Agreement Threatens Samba
Microsoft have decided to provide the European users with a “degraded” version of their OS (that is, a version without Windows Media Player) after being convicted in Europe. They have also been asked to provide competitors with documentation about servers to ensure inter-operability.
Well, righteo, say Microsoft. They have therefore decided to set up the “Work Group Server Protocol Program” (WSPP) to allow the competitors to have access to their documentation. However, competitors will have to pay royalties to do so. The WSPP agreement is clearly incompatible with GPL and would mean that, for example, a fee would have to be paid to Microsoft for any instance of Samba.
I don’t think one should be surprised by Microsoft’s move. It is actually a smart way to conform to the European Court of Justice decision without giving to much away. But it is certainly bad news for the Open Source community: Samba is an excellent tool, developed by passionate people with a sharing spirit (in every sense: that is the very nature of the product itself). I am sure they will always refuse to distribute Samba other than in a free way… Let’s hope the FSF actions will succeed.
