But Things like OpenOffice are certainly not specificly MS's IP, Office suites existed (AFAIK) before MS was around. As much as I sometimes would like to think so, not even MS is that dumb...

Samba seems a more likely candidate, I'm not familiar with how all these things work internally, but It strikes me that this thing is no different than an internet connection. In my ignorance, I assume that Samba essentially passes around knowledge of what the filesystem contains, which is no different than if I was hosting a website off of a Windows machine. In fact, if I'm allowed to (S)FTP into a windows box, or run a website which shows my entire filesystem over an intranet, then isn't that isomorphic to Samba? (I use Isomorphic since the given setup is certainly not as useful as Samba, but it does the same job.)

Again, I have no Idea how Samba or any network file system works, but it certainly seems that the argument against it is kindof flat.

~~Joe