Samba is well known by Mac users as being the protocol used when connecting a Mac to a PC. So far, Samba compatibility with Microsoft SMB system was obtained via reverse engineering technologies. Just before Christmas, Samba team received Microsoft protocol documentation. One should not think that Redmond's Giant did it on purpose to serve the open source community:
Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit, after losing their appeal against that decision on September 17th 2007.
Of course the Samba Team was pleased by this decision:
Andrew Tridgell, creator of Samba, said, "We are very pleased to be able to get access to the technical information necessary to continue to develop Samba as a Free Software project. Although we were disappointed the decision did not address the issue of patent claims over the protocols, it was a great achieveme
