Comments

5 responses to “Microsoft, Samba, Secretly Jump Into Bed In Public?”

1. 2008/01/02

   Carolyn

   Alec, I don’t know the answer to your question, but you gave me an education on “absurdist cognitive dissonance”.

   Reply
2. 2008/01/03

   Alexander Bokovoy

   Alex, please read http://www.samba.org/samba/PFIF/, it has all the details and explanations, including the agreement itself.

   The NDA covers *their* documentation but has nothing to extend over source code and comments we develop using “standard industry practices” from looking into that documentation. So if anyone would like to produce documentation based on Samba’s (or other free software projects that chose to participate in PFIF) source code, that documentation will be free of NDA. MS only wants to keep secret their’s and EU wasn’t able to find a law point to turn them otherwise.

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3. 2008/01/03

   alecm

   Alex! Long time no hear, and happy 2008! I entirely forgot someone sensible from Samba would read this!

   > So if anyone would like to produce documentation based on Samba’s source code, that documentation will be free of NDA.

   Oooookay, so [employing my superhuman powers of oversimplification] – the agreement really *is* a sop to keep MS’s lawyers happy, that they will “license” (ka-ching) “secret” (ka-ching) documentation into an open-source project, thus maintaining “secrecy” (ka-ching) which will still somehow “obviously” provide some “tangible” (ka-ching) “benefit” (ka-ching) to MS?

   (Bill for legal services rendered to Microsoft Corp, consultancy and services delivered, $497,950.13. ka-ching)

   It’s not like the recipe to Pepperidge Farm cookies, or something…

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4. 2008/01/03

   Alexander Bokovoy

   🙂

   The agreement is really to provide documentation as part of compliance with EU commission decision. We were successful to reduce amount of strange lawyerish stuff in it and now it is more of “NDAed documentation to write drivers” than “all your life belongs to us if you sign this paper”. So people who signed it (PFIF and contractors to it) are not allowed to show documentation to others but can freely translate it into compilable and working source code (barring cut-and-paste, of course).

   I don’t think MS lawyers are happy with this 🙂

   Happy New Year to you as well, looks like you had quite a Christmas travel. 🙂

   Reply
5. 2008/01/06

   Chris Samuel

   That NDA practice is not unusual, it’s been used by some firms to get GPL’d drivers written for Linux for their devices (the OpenBSD folks hate this as they are often written in an obscure fashion to keep things secret, and I have some sympathy for them on this).

   Tridge has a really nice history of this (including the fact that Sun started it back in 1998) including the fact that MS originally wanted per-copy licensing, but then were talked out of it:

   This in turn resulted in several weeks of intensive discussions, during which we found that Microsoft was indeed very willing to make modifications to the agreement to make it more suitable for use by the free software community. Microsoft was keen to ensure that it complied with the court ruling, Neil Barrett was happy to help facilitate those discussions, and of course we were more than willing to point out the parts of the agreement that were problematic for free software projects.

   So if the EC had decided to force MS to publicly document the protocols & remove the patent concerns it would have been brilliant, but I believe that it’s still a good deal (and could have been far worse).

   cheers!
   Chris

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