Microsoft's Mundie to Continue OSS Outreach

Techie writes "In an interview with eWeek Craig Mundie, Microsoft's new co-head-honcho and chief research and strategy officer, says he plans to continue to push the Redmond software titan forward with its goal of greater interoperability with software licensed under the GPL." From the article: "Even in Bill's own public remarks, he pointed out that he thought his iconic status and the way that was reported tended to overemphasize his role in the company's innovation and execution. This is really a transition that has been in the works for a couple of years, with a couple to go before, and we will see the emergence of a lot of great talent that has today been portrayed as all Bill. This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world. "

Comments

Re:I'm not following the question

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, Maybe if they want to interoperate better with OSS they should implement CSS 2, or transparent PNGs. Or maybe use ODF in their next word processor. Or fix their broken Kerberos implementation. There's a million things they could do to make it easier for their software to interoperate with GPLd softwaree. Maybe they should release some specs to their API, file formats, and network protocols so that OSS programmers don't have to guess how things are done, or reverse engineer them.

Re:You can only trash something for so long

[truthsearch]

From a quarterly report filed with the SEC by Microsoft on January 31, 2003 (emphasis mine):

Item 2. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations...
Challenges to the Company's Business Model. Since its inception, the Company's business model has been based upon customers agreeing to pay a fee to license software developed and distributed by Microsoft. Under this commercial software development ("CSD") model, software developers bear the costs of converting original ideas into software products through investments in research and development, offsetting these costs with the revenues received from the distribution of their products. The Company believes that the CSD model has had substantial benefits for users of software, allowing them to rely on the expertise of the Company and other software developers that have powerful incentives to develop innovative software that is useful, reliable and compatible with other software and hardware. In recent years, there has been a growing challenge to the CSD model, often referred to as the Open Source movement... The popularization of the Open Source movement continues to pose a significant challenge to the Company's business model, including recent efforts by proponents of the Open Source model to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of Open Source software in their purchase and deployment of software products. To the extent the Open Source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the Company's products may decline, the Company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline.

Three and a half years later and they're just starting to figure out what to do about it. They've known for a long time OSS would be significant competition. So far the only thing they've proven is they have no idea what to do about it.

Re:I'm not following the question

[aaronl]

A quick web search would've revealed that MS required vendor fields for authorization. They did not document these fields initially, so you would've had to reverse engineer their implementation. Eventually, MS published most of the details, but did so under a very restrictive license that didn't allow a "competitor" to use them. That means you still would have to reverse engineer those fields.

You can authenticate without the undefined extension, but cannot be authorized to specific resources offered by Windows machines. So it isn't hard for you to authorize *to* a MS Kerberos implementation, but you cannot authorize Windows against anyone else's implementation. You're missing group membership information and the NT ID without using the proprietary MS extensions.

This is a company that choose to ignore the Kerberos V5 spec, which was altered specifically to help them, they lied to the Kerberos developers about following the spec, lied about splitting authorization functionality, and lied about a non-NT version of the domain controller services. They attempted to undermine all existing Kerberos installations by breaking compatibility, and requiring people to run the MS version of the Kerberos protocol to have it work properly with Windows.

IOW, standard procedure for MS: they took the established Kerberos spec, added proprietary extensions to it, and made it not work properly without using those extensions, while ensuring that those extensions are only available under Windows with MS software.