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'Mr. Samba' Talks About Samba's Future
Jan Stafford writes "SearchEnterpriseLinux is running an article that gives the inside scoop from Samba guru John H. Terpstra on upcoming new features in Samba-3 and Samba-4, recent events in FUD-fighting and the benefits that businesses can realize by adopting open source early."
Surely if anyone deserves this title it's Andrew Tridgell.
Arrr. Samba-3 development an' support will continue until at least 2008. O'er that time 't will be gi'en th' ability t' integrate more seamlessly wi' Windows Active Directory an' its clients. Remote captainship features will be further expanded, an' a new remote procedure call infrastructure will replace th' current one, which will be keelhauled. Arrr. Additional facilities bein' added will assist sites that be havin' specific Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Th' myriad o' new technologies in Samba-4 will be aft-ported t' Samba-3, thus narrowin' th' gap between th' two versions. Samba-4 will ship within th' next voyage an' will live alongside Samba-3 fer a long time. Both versions will strive t' reduce resource requirements an' improve efficiency. Documentation improvements will also continue t' be made, wi' greater focus on support o' deployment an' wi' a lesser focus on th' nuts an' bolts in its internals.
...just about Samba 3. Samba 4 info can be found here
That's how it looks when someone knows how to answer questions. If you go back and look at those questions again you will see some real barbs. Allow me to point out some of the more dangerous ones:
For businesses, what is adopting Linux the first step toward?
This question came 2/3rds down the article when Linux was mentioned for the first time outside of the site name. The reporter is asking him to justify his product's and free software's existence. That a big question you can lose in daily details. His answer, "Linux is a first step toward organizational independence from single-vendor IT sources," is just what people want to hear.
Could you name a couple of other Samba-3 features that have a niche and are only used in those niches?
This is a follow up to another question that together are tricky. The first question asked him, "What are the primary capabilities of Samba-3 ..." John avoided the trap by not answering the first question litterally with one or two things and then rejecting the notion Samba is a "niche" product useful only to a few dozen small shops.
Those kinds of questions are classic. His answers are simply up to task. If you don't appreciate it, just let someone like Jan grill you one day. From a distance, behind good cover like John, the words look like honey. When they are in your face and you are trying to get other things done, they can look very hard. She's has been around longer than Linux and knows how to get a story. Bad answers to any of these questions would look bad but good answers are equally good.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I predict that 15 years from now on, Microsoft will either be sweeping their own ashes, or haved moved completely to the gaming business. The reason? In about 10 years, OpenOffice (or another clone) will kick MS-Office's arse, taking away Microsoft's main revenue.
Your prediction is wishful thinking at best, because I don't see any realistic logic being applied in your post. Like in game theory, to find the most winning path you have to assume your opponent (Microsoft in this case) will be making the best moves it can in its favor. Microsoft is not going to sit around for 10+ years while others out-compete it. This, of course, will be good for consumers because as open-source solutions become better alternatives, Microsoft will have to provide even better solutions, which open-source solutions will have to improve on, so on and so on.
ReactOS will have replaced windows in the same way FreeDOS can replace MS-DOS today
Ugh, that's a terrible selling point for your theory. Basically you're saying that FreeDOS can compete today with a product that was, for all purposes, shelved and not much developed on since 1995 (when Win95 came out as a standalone OS).
invoking a better future for children is just dumb.
It certainly isn't. There is a battle going on over who controls our software. Big software companies are trying to make us depend on their software and standards, OSS tries to do the opposite. Will our children be consumers who will be told what they want in the next corporate PR campaign or will they be citizens in control.
It's not about ethics or freedom, it is about money and power. It's about Microsoft being able to squeeze huge profits out of us not by making exceptional products but by controlling software standards that could have been open. It's also about monopolies breeding new monopolies, if we don't manage to stop it here it will go from bad to worse. So yes, Samba is a small part of an important fight and your ridiculing them isn't helpful.
Anyone who generalizes about slashdotters is a typical slashdotter.