[jcifs] Microsoft releases ball and chain.

[Michael B.Allen]

On Thu, 28 Mar 2002 13:59:09 -0600
"Caldarale, Charles R" <Chuck.Caldarale at UNISYS.com> wrote:

> > From: Christopher R.Hertel [mailto:crh at ubiqx.mn.org]
> > Subject: [jcifs] Microsoft releases ball and chain.
> > 
> > Of interest:
> > 
> >   www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?ReleaseID=37530
> > 
> > Some rules...
> > 
> > - If you want to look at the Microsoft document, please be 
> > sure to perform the document extraction on a Windows system.
> > The document is provided as a .exe file.
> 
> Not only is it packaged as a Windows executable (really just a ZIP file),
> it's actually a compiled html help (.chm) file. Doubt if you can read it
> anywhere other than a Win98/NT4 or above platform.
> 
> Running the .exe does not produce any licensing warning - it just unzips the
> .chm and its index file. There is no separate readme or anything else of
> that nature. Within the document, in a section entitled "Legal Information",
> you can find the following statement:
> 
> "THIS TECHNICAL REFERENCE IS AVAILABLE FOR YOU TO REVIEW, HOWEVER, IF YOU
> WANT TO IMPLEMENT THE TECHNOLOGY DESCRIBED IN THIS TECHNICAL REFERENCE, YOU
> MUST SIGN AND RETURN TO MICROSOFT THE ROYALTY-FREE CIFS TECHNICAL REFERENCE
> LICENSE AGREEMENT."
> 
> The upper-casing is Microsoft's. Nowhere, however, does it give you a clue
> as to where you might actually find the "ROYALTY-FREE CIFS TECHNICAL
> REFERENCE LICENSE AGREEMENT".

You have to admire them for being sneaky bastards. We demand technical
documentation so they take the freely available version, put a bow
on it, and now we need a license to look at it. Like we need another
version of that document anyway. The DOJ doesn't have a chance in hell
of understanding what MS is doing and if we complain it just makes
us look like a bunch of whiners. In the end I don't think it really
matters though. They don't understand how their servers work any better
than we do. At some point they just code until all the unit test cases
work. There is no "spec" and there never will be because CIFS isn't
worth standardizing.

-- 
May The Source be with you.