The Samba team’s Andrew Bartlett has an interesting post here regarding a couple of Microsoft interoperability events he attended recently. He does a good job of painting a picture of the changes happening within Microsoft with regard to engaging with the FOSS community and while I’ve seen these changes unfolding over the last four or five years it’s nice to see them being acknowledged by somebody in Andrew’s position. I would recommend you read the complete article however these snippets will hopefully give you an idea of the overall tone of his post:

“This has been an amazing year of changes for those of us with an interest in interoperability with Microsoft, and these two events are an excellent example of the change in practice.”

“… we have a beachhead at Redmond, and a department committed to providing the Free Software community with answers or clarification on any reasonable interoperability question”

“The Free Software community still does not have perfect interoperability with Microsoft's products - far from it - but the bottleneck is our own pace of implementation and comprehension, not missing documentation or the difficult task of network analysis so often required in the past”

“We were very surprised by the extraordinary degree of effort that Microsoft put into this single vendor plug fest. We were given direct access to the Active Directory product team in Microsoft, plus we had a team of 6 Microsoft engineers working with us full time for the whole week of the plug fest, and were able to call upon additional Microsoft engineers with specialist knowledge in specific areas as needed.”

“However, the WSPP program and Microsoft's new protocol documentation is not just about 'Samba' things - the protocols covered are any that a windows client uses to talk to a windows server. Many other Free Software projects can and should take advantage of the new documentation and clarification process.”

Andrew also references Microsoft’s Protocol Programs which, as he notes in that last quote above, are something I believe many FOSS projects could and should take advantage of.