Slashback: Bundestux, Kerberos, Blizzard

Slashback tonight with several updates and amplifications, starting with a nice report on the current state of the effort to put Linux into the heart of the German government, but also bits on Starcraft, cleaning up UNIX config, and Kerberos.

This deserves a hearty 'Jawohl!' DocSnyder writes: "Since the Bundestux campaign started collecting votes in favor of putting Free Software into the German parliament (Bundestag), more than 25000 people have done so. A lot of online discussions - in addition to Heise News and Linux-Community.de, even some Bundestag parties have put up their online forums - are very active to share user experience about GNU/Linux and Free Software. (Sorry for most of the linked sites speaking German, it's simply too much to translate at once.)

After several open letters and press releases have been exchanged between lobbyists and politicians, some information about a research performed by the German company Infora appeared on Heise News (english version), recommending an all-Microsoft infrastructure with the exception of some security-critical services like e-mail. The detailed paper is still not available.

An internal test (english version) between the Bundestag administration, SuSE, IBM and Microsoft confirmed that GNU/Linux and Free Software are in fact ready for the Bundestag's IT infrastructure, yet the testers don't like the copy&paste method used by KDE and recommend Windows for the desktops.

Last week, the Bundestag members (MdB) Jörg Tauss and Hans-Joachim Otto have been invited by Heise for an online chat with the community. While Jörg Tauss is a clear supporter of open standards and Free Software, Hans-Joachim Otto takes the internal test as well as Infora's research as primarily relevant for the coming decision.

On Saturday, MdB Uwe Küster summarized some details in an interview. He considered the decision - officially due Feb 28 - as almost finalized. The solution would show GNU/Linux on most servers, Windows XP and Office XP on the desktops, keeping proprietary data formats and lock-in interfaces up to the next upgrade cycle, which in fact would have been problem number one to solve.

All in all, the community has provided lots of experience, ideas and solution paths which finally seem to be largely ignored in the decision finding process towards the successor of a homogenous Microsoft Windows NT4 infrastructure, which has to be replaced until 2003 when Microsoft will no longer provide support for NT4."

That's a lot of cleaning up to do! maffew writes "A lot of feedback and ideas have been flying around since my article How to fix the Unix configuration nighmare was featured on freshmeat and slashdot. So we've created an ongoing web site and mailing list for people to continue discussing, organising, and hopefully in the end coding. It's all at unixconfig.sourceforge.net.

Meanwhile here's a link to the permanent home for the nightmare article. This is where I'm making revisions and adding links."

Raise your hand if this would mean seeing it for the 4th time ... Chris Brewer writes "In case you've been living on a different planet, The Fellowship of the Ring picked up Five Baftas, the British equivalent of the Oscars, including Best Director, Best Film, and Peoples Choice. During a live interview (Real only) after the awards, Peter Jackson announces that a preview for The Two Towers will be shown from the March 22 screenings of The Fellowship."

At long last ... something? If you've followed the strange relationship Microsoft has had with Kerberos, you may feel grateful to the anonymous coward who writes: "It would seem that Microsoft is granting the world a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to implement their Kerberos extension."

Here's some comfort for Starcraft players. An Anonymous Coward writes "As stated on Blizzard's battle.net service, the latest Starcraft patch supports UDP play, so some of the compelling reasons to use bnetd have been addressed. Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans."

Comments

MS Kerberos, a corporate culture of wrongness

[WasterDave]

Yipee! They published their wire protocol:

"All data is encoded as little-endian."

Oh, god. Look, since the start of time itself binary data on the net has been big endian. No, you do not know better.

Head->table: Bang! Bang! Bang!

Dave

Microsoft bows to outside pressure?

[AndyDeck]

I'm practically speechless here... Microsoft has actually relinquished a proprietary lock.

I am neither expert enough at Kerberos nor Samba to know if the above-referenced web page (Here in case you missed it) is truly sufficient for interoperability, but it sure looks like it.

And the critical language is at the bottom:

Microsoft grants you a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any Microsoft copyrights in this specification to copy, publish and distribute this specification, and to implement this specification in your products.

and

Microsoft is not currently aware of the existence of patent(s) and/or pending application(s) that are essential to the implementation of this specification. However, if Microsoft becomes aware or has any patent(s) and/or pending applications that are essential to implement this specification, Microsoft will grant you a royalty-free license under applicable Microsoft intellectual property rights essential to implement this specification for the sole purpose of implementing this specification. Microsoft expressly reserves all other rights it may have in the material and subject matter of this specification. The licensing commitments made hereunder do not include any license for implementation of other published specifications developed elsewhere but referred to in this specification.

Translation: You can use this spec in your products. It's not covered by any of our current or pending patents, and even if it is, you can still use it royalty-free.

Other related specs are not rendered licensed or royalty-free, so they MAY have kept a loophole - but this looks sincere so far.

Amazing news, really.

Starcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the UDP support has nothing to do with bnetd. Starcraft was ported to Mac OS X, which doesn't have a working IPX protocol that they could use. So rather than try to graft IPX onto the Carbon version of Starcraft they created a new UDP version for LAN play with OS X, then added UDP to the other versions afterwards.

There were a few posts to insidemacgames.com's forums by the Blizzard techs who made the patch.

Re:Listening to which fans?

[Bowfinger]

Be reasonable. D1 was great in its day. I lost thousands of hours to it. But D1 is a dead product, superceded by D2. If you liked the original, you will probably like D2 even better. It's the same basic game, but with far, far greater variety and replay value. Of course, if you didn't like D1, you may not like D2 either. To each his own.

There is no replacement for StarCraft. There doesn't appear to be one on the horizon. I think it is remarkable that a company like Blizzard continues to support and enhance it. How many other companies are still provding free patches for five-year-old games? How many other companies even provide bug fixes for old products like this with little sales potential?

I too am concerned about Blizzard's actions with respect to bnetd. I understand their legitimate need (and their right) to control the spread of the Warcraft III beta, but they overreacted. I hope this is just an aberration. Too many companies seem to have run out of fresh ideas of their own, so they use the legal system to suppress fair competition. It would be a shame if Blizzard has joined that list.

Yes, Blizzard has problems. If you look at their overall record, I think Blizzard is still one of the good guys. There don't seem to be many of them left. Give Blizzard a little slack, at least for a while longer.

But that's just my $0.02 worth.