Microsoft speecifically targets Samba
A while ago I visited a speech of a Microsoft employee about Microsofts opinion about open source and open standards. Raul Pesch told there that Microsoft considered open source as a real competitor and understood that open source sometimes bring some advantages in comparisation with closed source software, but that Microsoft was not able to become an open source company because of the chosen business model a long time ago.
Taking this in consideration, the latest move of Microsoft while negotiating with the EU is not very nice. Maybe this is the proof of the fact that MS is never nice to competitors and only use their power to crush the competition instead of taking the battle.
Slashdot writes:
Microsoft’s latest attempt to reconcile with the European Commission’s antitrust rulings against the company may result in another victim. It seems their offer, if accepted, will strike a considerable blow at a leading competitor in the realm of file and printer sharing. The popular open source suite Samba stands to be the recipient of a backhanded slap from Redmond if the offer stands and the European branch of the Free Software Foundation is taking it personally. Though Microsoft is offering to make some information regarding interoperability available to competitors, it’s only under the condition that implementations are not open source. According to FSFE president Georg Greve, “the proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a free software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software.
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