Samba has fighting chance now against Microsoft

By David Lawsky

BRUSSELS, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Microsoft's (MSFT.O) compliance with a landmark European Union antitrust decision has opened competition for servers, where one rival says it now has a fighting chance to take on the software giant's dominance.

The open-source, non-profit Samba software group says it won some things but not everything it wanted this week, when Microsoft said it would stop fighting against the EU's 2004 antitrust decision.

In a major change of direction, Microsoft agreed to provide competitors with vital interconection information, one month after the EU's second-highest court backed the Commission's decision.

But the deal leaves the playing field uneven, Samba says.

"There is still contested ground to win," said Eban Moglen, a Columbia University law professor who also heads the Software Freedom Law Center, which backs the free software movement and represents Samba.

That ground is in most offices around the world, where "work group servers" connect to desktop PCs and run printers, access files and act as the cockpit of the entire network, coordinating resources and providing personalised access, user by user.

Samba can print and access files but it lacks the ability to work as a cockpit, something that can be done today only by Microsoft's Active Directory. Samba says its own approach is a decade old, ancient history in the world of software.

Samba's aim is to provide a free, full-service product to go head-to-head with Microsoft in the multi-billion dollar market.

To do that, it needs interconnection information.

Then Samba's engineers can develop its products, which dovetail with the commercial world. Companies like Red Hat (RHT.N), Canonical and Oracle (ORCL.O) and others make money by selling service and installation with Samba's free products.

PIONEER SIDETRACKED

Severs were originally pioneered for PCs by Novell (NOVL.O), which got its interconnect information from Microsoft. Once Microsoft entered the server field it stopped giving full information and rival products stopped working smoothly.

Microsoft captured the lion's share of the market, wiping out profits of commercial rivals, the Commission and then the EU court found.

Samba is a non-profit organisation so a lack of profits could not kill it, making it the last real competitor standing.