MS No Cathedral, Open Source No Bazaar?

AlexGr sends us to InternetNews.com for an account of a Microsoft VP demonstrating Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX product running on Ubuntu at AJAXWorld. In his earlier keynote, Brad Abrams had declared that, when it comes to AJAX, Microsoft is not the cathedral and open source isn't really a bazaar. He noted that ASP.NET AJAX is available under Microsoft's permissive license with full source code. "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards," Abrams said.

Comments

Hmm. First example of it.

[flydpnkrtn]

So the first example of MS not using the Cathedral model, and they act like this is huge sweeping change? Release the source to Win2K under the permissive license, or help the Samba team figure out the damn protocols for Active Directory authentication, and then maybe we'll talk about "changes" and "open standards"

Re:Hmm. First example of it.

[stikves]

It's true that Microsoft used a "vendor specific" byte in Kerberos protocol to keep SAMBA out (at least for a while). It's not good.

But Microsoft also handles many protocols nicely (as long as it's on the server side), and provides easy to use GUIs to setup and administer them.

For example, let's say I want to store all my infrastructure for user accounts, X509 certificate and DNS services and email configuration on a LDAP directory and would like to access via Kerberos as well.

The setup wizard for Active Directory will handle all these tasks (automatically) in less than 10 minutes (and add 30 minutes setup for Exchange and service packs). Additionally I'll receive many administration GUIs, fully redundant setup and backup programs. (Not including group policy which does not have a good alternative on Linux side yet).

On the other hand the same infrastructure setup on linux (with Fedora Directory Server or similar), requires coding plenty of scripts (LDAP gateway, sendmail configurations, kerberos password migration, etc, etc) and will probably take 3 days at best. Additionally I'll have to setup Amanda and similar backup strategies by hand.

So, I'd either choose to invest $1000 on a Windows Server 2003 license once, or hire an administrator with $1000 more salary per month than a current one.

Unfortunately many enterprises choose the first one

(btw our current setup uses Fedora Directory Server as main, while we also have an Active Directory installation in parallel, yet this is only because we're a university and we like to experiment more).

Re:Hmm. First example of it.

[marcosdumay]

"It's true that Microsoft used a "vendor specific" byte in Kerberos protocol to keep SAMBA out (at least for a while). It's not good.

But Microsoft also handles many protocols nicely (as long as it's on the server side), and provides easy to use GUIs to setup and administer them.

For example, let's say I want to store all my infrastructure for user accounts, X509 certificate and DNS services and email configuration on a LDAP directory and would like to access via Kerberos as well."

So, you mean that they abuse their economical power... But it is ok, since they do that with a nice GUI? Or are you saying (falsely) that Microsoft has not extended those protocols? Because they have extended (or tried) almost all of them, DNS being the only exception, and irrelevant since they already tried to extend TCP.

"The setup wizard for Active Directory will handle all these tasks (automatically) in less than 10 minutes (and add 30 minutes setup for Exchange and service packs). Additionally I'll receive many administration GUIs, fully redundant setup and backup programs. (Not including group policy which does not have a good alternative on Linux side yet).

On the other hand the same infrastructure setup on linux (with Fedora Directory Server or similar), requires coding plenty of scripts (LDAP gateway, sendmail configurations, kerberos password migration, etc, etc) and will probably take 3 days at best. Additionally I'll have to setup Amanda and similar backup strategies by hand."

Now, you seem to be very uninformed. There is quite a long time since people don't need to edit sendmail configs for a normal server (unless you talking about setting your netmask), Windows didn't deal with email by that time. There is less time that LDAP gateways and kerberos servers work easily, but they also do. And I'd really like to know what nice backup solution you get on Windows out of the box, even completely ignoring that to set-up amanda one just need to say where to put all those files and what to backup (I really doubt any other solution won't require that information). Someone that already knows those systems may very well configure it all on a day.

And, at leat at my box (hint, it's Debian, one of the most geeky and hard to configure distros out there) there are GUIs for most of those.

"So, I'd either choose to invest $1000 on a Windows Server 2003 license once, or hire an administrator with $1000 more salary per month than a current one.

Unfortunately many enterprises choose the first one"

That tells how good at math are those people... Of course 3 days of work by $1000 a month are much cheapper than $1000 on licences and not accounted work on making all that software work as intented.

And, are you implying that windows doesn't need maintence?!?!?!

Re:Hmm. First example of it.

[J0nne]

nevermind that VS2005 defaults to strict XHTML 1.1 code.

and is it served as application/xhtml+xml by default too? Because there's a certain browser by Microsoft that can't handle that...

Re:Hmm. First example of it.

[Shados]

Its served as to whatever is crossbrowser. The team that makes VS isn't the team that makes IE, and are probably as pissed off as we all are about how uncompliant it is (for example, the design view for ASP.NET in VS2005 renders correctly a bunch of CSS that IE will ignore even though its in the specs, AND will bitch and whine quite a bit if you dare use a IE CSS filter).

That being said, last I checked, VS2005 default to XHTML 1.0 transitional, not XHTML 1.1 strict :)

Re:Hmm. First example of it.

[Super_Z]

AD is LDAP compliant so use can also use nss_ldap to grab user information on Linux system from it

The devil lies in the details. LDAP compliance does not ensure that a product can be used as advertised. The killer lies in the (lack of) implementation of OID matching rules.

Linux and Windows nodes can perform two directional file sharing via standard* CIFS protocol

The fact that this can be done is a credit to the Samba community and definetly not a credit to MS.

With Windows Server 2003 R2, AD can also serve standard NIS, NFS, CUPS and similar UNIX protocols.

Try creating a file with e.g a colon in it on a volume mounted from a WS2003 server. Their NFS implementation is not only half-assed - its a complete bastard to set up. Other companies - like NetApp - has *far* better products. Which only shows that MS just couldn't be bothered with doing a good job compatibility wise.
I also find no mention on the WS2003 server feature page that it can serve anything remotely CUPS'ish. You were probably thinking of IPP?

If you include non standard (but known) protocols in the mix, Windows and Linux machines can also interoperate via DFS (Distributed File Sharing), RPD (Terminal Services), etc.

RDP support on unix hosts should definetly not be credited MS.

The AD compatibility list and its features may look nice on a glossy paper. To be honest - I wouldn't touch it with a long stick. Its a one way street into a long life of MS induced pain - non-compatibilities, forced upgrades, a license policy that you need professional help to understand etc.

Not to mention the happy fact that with AD, MS has a perfect instrument to enforce any diabolic license-policy they can think of - at any point in time they want to. They are in complete control of your core infrastructure.

Re:they did the obvious but finished last

[sumdumass]

The license is very similar to the BSD style license. But more interestingly, according to open source legal, It passes on the ability to use any patents they have on it royalty "free". Something that Java SCript probably couldn't do alone.

Weird site, opensourcelegal.org

[Gregory Cox]

I don't know what to make of the opensourcelegal.org site linked to in the story.

Generally sites talking about open source tend to be keen to advocate the open source philosophy, but the tone of this site is mostly neutral and lacking any overtly expressed opinion. If anything, the page titled Why Open Source? seems more negative than positive.

So perhaps the legal firm running the site is playing up the difficulties and uncertainties surrounding open source as a way of promoting its legal help on the subject? But I can't see anything on the (rather small) site advertising legal services at all. It doesn't really have enough content to get many visits for its news or information. I wonder why it was set up...

Clear and Correct perspective on MS.

[3seas]

Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing company.

They can and will say what ever they need to to get people to buy.

Second in priority is Microsoft is their own legal advisors to advise
themselves, (based on their interpretation of the law - no different
than any other lawyer or law firm) on what they can get away with, what
they can get in trouble for but balanced against what they gain in
breaking the law (do they gain more than they lose - if so then they
see it as a cost of doing business).

Third in priority is the bullying and buy out of the competition. Of
course their legal house is involved in this too.

Forth has become the application submittal for as many patents as
they can get, even stupid stuff that is clearly not patentable. In
the battle against open source this will become combined with the
third priority more and more.

What you don't see in any of the above is genuine innovation.

Microsoft does NOT enable fair play. But they often make claims
in contridiction of what they actually do.

Microsoft has a very long and hard earned reputation of being
dishonest with marketing speak.

But we all know this, those of use that read slashdot.

And slashdot users are not who this markting bull is aimed at.

Or maybe we should thank MS for enabling us to be open?

"Permissive Licence" doesn't seem awful

[Just Some Guy]

I noticed two main things in that license text:

You can't remove any copyright, patent, or atribution notices. Kind of like the dreaded BSD advertising clause, in that if someone puts "Parts written by 1337 h4xx0rz" in the output of the program, you have to leave it there. Repeat ad nauseum for every contributor that jumps on the bandwagon, and things could get... unaesthetic.

They use almost the exact same patent control system as the GPLv3. If a program contains patented code, you're granted permission to use those patents to execute it. If you sue one of the patent holders for violations of your own patent, that permission is revoked. I think this is called the "please don't eat me, IBM!" clause. Seriously, though, this needs to be pointed out every single time some Microsoft shill attacks the GPLv3. You can dislike v3, but you can't really call it anti-business when the world's largest software vendor implemented parts of it in their own license.