Under the terms of the March 24, 2004 European Commission antitrust ruling against Microsoft and a subsequent loss of the appeal, Microsoft has been required to hand over documentation that will allow the Samba team to make Samba work much better, according to LinuWorld recently.

Samba is an open source project used by Mac OS X, Linux, and other UNIXes to interface to the Windows file and print system.

"Theyire giving us all the documentation to make everything work," said Jeremy Allison, co-author of Samba. "We will have no more excuses to suck ... if we donit have something, we wonit be able to say it’s not our fault we don’t know how to do it."

The Samba developers will have to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA) for the documentation, but will still be able to write open source software in Samba to make the interface work as intended.

There have been persistent reports of minor gotchas and technical difficulties in the Samba implementation, including Mac OS X, over the years, and this agreement will be good news especially for Mac OS X in the enterprise.