There's an interesting conversation going on over on the JavaSummit list on Yahoo! Groups, (which has spilled over to Sun tech evangelist Simon Phipp's weblog concerning Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's final judgement against Microsoft in its anti-trust trial.

The whole thing started when Noel Bergman noted that Microsoft has turned the loss into a winby turning interoperability with Windows into a poison pill. Microsoft can't claim all of CIFS or SMB as proprietary protocols, but it can add proprietary extensions to them–and charge a licensing fee for using those extensions, based on the final ruling.

Want to use Linux as a file server for Windows clients? Whoops–Microsoft ships a patch to its client-server protocols, and all of a sudden your file server dissapears. And only a commercial software package will fix the problem, since Microsoft has made the protocol proprietary in the process–and everybody has to cough up money to get access to it.

This is why I said in 1998 that the Justice Department was barking up the wrong tree–and that the server was where Microsoft had the greatest opportunity for anti-competitive behavior. The only way around this gambit, short of a new antitrust case, is to either take the war to the client( develop a freeware/shareware SMB driver that replaces/”enhances” the Microsoft client protocols on the client) or migrate to another network file sharing and directory stack.