[Mono-list] Re: Mono-list digest, Vol 1 #284 - 23 msgs

[Jason Keirstead]

/3.2 Patent License. Subject to Sections 3.3 - 3.7, Microsoft hereby 
grants Company a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, personal, 
transferable, non-sublicensable, license under its Necessary Claims to 
(1) make, use, import, and (2) offer to sell, sell and distribute, 
directly or indirectly, to End Users, Company Implementations that fully 
comply with the Technical Reference. The above license is limited to 
implementing the CIFS communication protocol itself, and does not 
include any express or implied licenses or other rights to any 
underlying technology (operating system technology, local file system 
technology, etc.) that may be used to make a complete file server or 
other CIFS compatible device./

This whole document is a LICENSE. The claims in section 3.2 are only 
vaild if you recieved and read the Technical Reference in the first 
place. If you never read or recieved the Technical Reference, then you 
never agreed to this license. Therefore producing implimentations 
compatable with said reference does not break any laws. Since the Samba 
project has pretty much been reverse-engineering everything themselves 
form the get-go anyway, mainly because MS doesn't follow their own 
specs, this is not a big problem. Not that it wa sibn the first place, 
since the Samba project is european in origion (I believe?) and software 
patents are not valid in Europe.

As for the DMCA, I would suggest you read it, yourself, it is not that 
long. But the jist of the clause is that you must by law allow others to 
interoperate with your products, ie  you can't lock people out of 
competing with you.

Brian Crowell wrote:

>>You have this all wrong Robert. If you go to
>>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/d
>>
>nkerb/html/Finalcifs_LicenseAgrmnt_032802.asp,
>
>>which is the MSDN announcement the article draws from, and read
>>it, you will
>>see that this referrs ot the CIFS TECH MANUAL, not CIFS itself.
>>
>
>Er... no. The license deals with both the copyright on the CIFS manual
>(section 3.1 of the license) and the CIFS patents (section 3.2 of the
>license).
>
>
>>Not allowing
>>CIFS to interoperate with other pieces of software which wish to do so is
>>illegal under the DMCA.
>>
>
>I'm not familiar with the DCMA, but this sounds very interesting. Could you
>point me to the section containing the provision you mentioned?
>
>--Brian
>
>---
>