Documentation doesn't prevent reinventing the wheel, it might actually encourage it (unless the sheer volume dissuades developers).

call me crazy,

but is MS publishing and charging for this so open source can never again 'hack' into the system. No more free Samba, no NTFS interfaces on any machine without paying MS ?

"... access to Microsoft's protocols and APIs will help speed development, as developers don't need to re-invent the wheel ..."

That is fundamentally wrong - access to something done by Microsoft isn't in any way required to write good and innovative software. What access to these document WILL do is allow people to write software that will connect to Microsofts stuff with a bit less hassle than at present.

Unfortunately, because of the huge market share Microsoft has, third party products are forced to work with Microsoft products if they want a chance in the corporate arena - not because Microsoft products are neccessarily good or best in class, but simply because they are so ubiquitous.

Why is it when Microsoft reinvent the wheel it goes from four sides to three - one less bump but still totally impractical.

Individuals don't license the same way that corporations do. If you were a developer and you were purchasing a license for the codecs to be used in your software for re-licensing to your customers when your software is purchased/licensed, then it would cost you $1m or more (I bet MS got a deal for bulk licensing). As a consumer rather than a producer you would have a completely different type of license that would only allow you to make content or view content with the codecs, not give the codecs to other people, and it would be considerablly less maybe a few hundred or less for all of them.

Hi,

I think it's fair to point out that whatever MS decides to publish, they've made it abundantly clear that only non-commercial use of the software is granted without royalties. The Samba organization just paid a nice fat fee to get the protocol info for servers, and sublicensing appears to be included.

Whether or not that same info can be used in the states without royalties is a bit unclear as well.

Doesn't it seem ironic that the world's largest software, with Psycho Steve Ballmer at the helm, has to use patents, cross-licensing, vague and confusing licensing fee schedules and other techniques to keep free software from out of the enterprise? I guess they're really afraid of shareholder lawsuits.

Just wondering.

Yes, it's documented. Apart from the fact some of this documentation is rather poor, some of the APIs are unusably buggy (and result in memory corruption), and there are no debug symbols to aid debugging.. Developing a reliable exchange connector is not fun.