Samba developer declares Microsoft to be officially open-source friendly

By Microsoft Subnet on Fri, 10/24/08 - 10:43am.

It's been a year since Microsoft's failed attempt to shrug off the EU's demands over interoperability. It's been about 10 months since Samba capitalized on that by striking a deal with Microsoft for its protocols -- and the love affair between Samba and Microsoft has since blossomed, declares Samba developer Andrew Bartlett. Bartlett even goes as far as to say that any issues of interoperability between open source and Microsoft are the fault of the open source community -- Microsoft is doing its share and then some. In September, for instance, Microsoft organized two interoperability conferences, Bartlett says.

"This follows up on documentation of over 100 protocols delivered, well over 100 requests for clarification answered, Samba code debugged and fortnightly conference calls held. ... The Free Software community still does not have perfect interoperability with Microsoft's products - far from it - but the bottleneck is our own pace of implementation and comprehension, not missing documentation or the difficult task of network analysis so often required in the past."

This declaration won't change the minds of people determined to hate Microsoft. But for IT folks looking for affordable ways to run their businesses, the happy union of Microsoft, Samba and (hopefully) the rest of the open source world is a beautiful thing.

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