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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. "
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.