As announced on the samba website, "the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit".

Of note is that the PFIF will make a one-time payment of 10000€ to Microsoft, and that the documentation will be kept internal by the PFIF. But the Samba developers will be able to use what they learn from the documentation in Free Software implementations without further restriction.

Although Samba did very well without any access to Protocol documentation, doing even better than Microsoft's products in some tests, this will help the project to closely follow the changes in Windows protocols.

Samba also published an history of this case.