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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Punished with a reward?

More on this - Noel has been doing some research [group signup required] at the Microsoft site and his reading of the evidence is worrying:

...Microsoft is asserting
that if you want to interoperate with their extended version of SMB, then
you have to pay. Microsoft states that "The SMB protocol extends the public
CIFS protocol with additional security, file, and disk management support."
While CIFS may be public, they state that "SMB is included in the protocols
licensed under the Microsoft Communications Protocol Program", and requires
a licensing fee

This means that, in the same spirit as the persecution of music enthusiasts by the RIAA and of Linux users by SCO, they are free to tax and extinguish the competition:

By targeting the wire-level PROTOCOL instead of software as the licensed
entity, the MCPP is bypassing the issue of software licenses, or even
software ownership, and requires a payment regardless of how you license
your interoperable software, or how it was developed. A clean room
implementation wouldn't help avoid fees. Microsoft is effectively claiming
a copyright on the de facto protocol upon which interoperability would be
based.

In an instant message discussion he said to me:

If Microsoft is able to extract a licensing fee for the wire-level protocol, it effectively negates the issue of open source, free software, public domain software, whatever. because they are seizing on Sun's idea: the network is the computer. And if you can tax the network protocol, you own the computer.

So a whole new twist on 'embrace and extend'. And all at the request of the US courts as a remedy for their monopolistic behaviour. Punished with a reward.

posted at 3:39 PM (UK) | |