It all started way back in 2004 when Microsoft appealed against the Anti-Trust
decision by the European Commission. The result was that Microsoft got what it actually deserves.
Microsoft lost the appeal in September 2007 !!!
As a result it was forced to make protocol documentation available to competitors. Microsoft has organized interoperability fests in Santa Clara and Redmond in late September and early October 2008 and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way. They even invited then invited the Samba Team to it’s home campus for a week of hands on testing with their engineers.
It seems that the sky is indeed falling, as Microsoft’s engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully inter operable with Active Directory.
Andrew Bartlett of Samba has even written a document describing Samba’s collaboration with the MicroSoft Active Directory Team.
Note: I was reading up today 28/09/2009 on some more articles on Samba and came across these links describing the Samba Team view on the whole episode.
Links:
1) Samba Team Recives Microsoft Protocol Documentation.
