[LINK] Microsoft licenses protocols to Samba

[Glen Turner]

The EU anti-trust judgement required Microsoft to license
it's file, print and authentication protocols.  The Samba
Project and Microsoft have agreed terms.

Microsoft gets a once-off E10,000 (ie, gets paid for
its anti-trust actions, hmmm).  Samba and other software
projects get documentation and a list of patents to avoid.
Unlike the US DoJ Microsoft protocol licensing scheme, the
terms are acceptable to FOSS developers.

Andrew Tridgell, Samba's negotiator, has some excellent
descriptions of the agreement:
http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/2007/news-20071220-01.en.html

The terms of the agreement are far superior to the
recent protocol licensing and cooperation agreements
signed between Microsoft and Novell, Samsung, etc.
Those companies now find themselves paying royalties
on per-unit shipments rather than a lowish one-off
fee.

It is interesting to note that all of the complainants
except Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba Project
settled with Microsoft for US$1.4B in total.

Microsoft's Exchange e-mail and calendaring protocols are
not included in the agreement, as they were not the subject
of the original complaint to the EU.