Re: EU is on the loose.

The 'Samba' case was exactly a demand of giving nessecary
documentation. But this was about the protocol. MS are using their
'own' kind of SMB/CIFS in their desktop and file servers. Samba
has(had?) to reverse engineer the protocol in order to get MS
'compatibility'.

OK. But is such a case so terrible that it requires some government or
supra-governmental agency to force MS to share or 'document' its own
code? Back in the day, MS had to reverse engineer the WordPerfect
document format to get a good importer for Word - were the owners of
WordPerfect at the time committing a terrible misdeed in not being
'open'? My intuition says 'no' to both questions, though others
obviously see the general issue differently.

[1] I have seen various warnings about using Outlook against 'other'
IMAP servers.

Boo for Outlook then - why not look for an alternative? Looking at the
matter in general terms, if MS have a general policy of tying their
products so closely together that rejecting one may require rejecting a
bunch, then in the long run this may well turn out to MS' comptetitive
disadvantage.
.

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