MS's Hilf Named Windows Server Marketer

netbuzz writes "The director of Microsoft's Open Source Lab, Bill Hilf, has added a new duty — general manager of Windows server marketing — to his already established role of shepherding the company's efforts to have open source software peacefully coexist with Microsoft technologies. What the company calls a 'natural evolution' of Hilf's job description may not be considered quite so natural among segments of the open source community that eye every Microsoft move with suspicion if not hostility." Bill Hilf answered Slashdot's questions two years back and sounded quite friendly to OSS; yet at other times he has come off like a hardcore Microsoftie.

Comments

acronyms

[User 956]

MS's Hilf's Named Windows Server Marketer

Ok, I know what MILF stands for, but HILF? You've lost me.

Re:acronyms

[Digitus1337]

Maybe this T-shirt could shed some light on it.

If at first you don't succeed ...

[tomhudson]

> "Bill Hilf, has added a new duty -- general manager of Windows server marketing -- to his already established role of shepherding the company's efforts to have open source software peacefully coexist with Microsoft technologies"

So, let's analyse this. Hilf failed at getting open source software to "peacefully coexist" with Microsoft shite. His "reward" is to take on Windows server marketing - an area where open source beats Microsoft in terms of quality, TCO, initial price, and performance.

So Hilf is being punished, right?

Embrace, Extetend, Exterminate

[Zombie Ryushu]

Windows Server do not at all co-exist with with Linux or any other type of server. Virtually all interoperability of Windows Servers and Linux Clients, or Linux Servers and Windows Clients is done through Reverse engineering of Windows SMB. So that makes Samba absolutely indespensible.

If you have have a Linux Server and a Heterogeneous or even one Windows client, you have no choice but to run Samba because Windows only talks to Windows.

Now before you go hauling off talking about Kerberos Realm mode:
That mode is completely useless. With Kerberos Realm mode, you have no Domain functionality, your machine is reverted to Workgroup status. No roaming profiles, no policies, no drive mapping scripts. So repeat after me, "Kerberos Realm Mode is fucking Horrible!" and nobody uses it.

Now. So lets say you go the Samba Domain Controller Route. In fact, lets go ideal and say you have someone who really knows what they are doing. Samba Domain Controller With Kerberos, NT4 SP6 Policy Editor Running under Wine, with LDAP Backend, either with OpenLDAP or Fedora DS.

Well.

Your Linux Clients work just fine. They login, get account data out of LDAP, Authenticate with Kerberos, maybe use AFS or Samba with Kerberos Authentication. (That works only for Linux boxen under Samba 3.0)

Your Windows Clients? See a bizzare Hellscape of situations where it looks like its surrounded on all sides by "Windows NT 4.9" Servers that all claim to be primary domain controllers. The Kerberos mode? They ignore that and fall back to NTLMv2. They can't even tell the Kerberos or LDAP Servers are even there. Still pretty decent interoperability.

lets take the reverse.

Well, Windows Servers will run AD, thats all they will do, thats all they have done.

Windows clients, GPO, all that shit. Linux Clients? Well. You can try the "Services For Unix" method with Kerberos and LDAP trick, but its doubtful that will work. Your best chance again, Samba with Winbind. Linux has too reverse engineer everything. Microsoft policy is very is not Embrace, Extend, Exterminate with Windows Servers. Its just Exterminate. To Microsoft, the only good Linux User is a Dead Linux User.

Re:It makes sense

[Locutus]

there are people who still think that Bill Hilf was hired to educate Microsoft on how to work with GNU/Linux and open source software and they are fools. He was hired to educate Microsoft on how to market Microsoft Windows and Microsoft software over GNU/Linux and OSS. He built a lab running all kinds of OSS project and they evaluated what was good, bad, ugly and how Microsoft software could be marketed against that which they learned. Bill Hilf's roll as marketing guy for Windows Server was always the plan and makes complete sense given his initial role.

So stop kidding yourselves into thinking Microsoft wants to work with GNU/Linux and OSS. They want it gone and they want everyone using only Microsoft software. There is not half way. There is no interoperability. Those are marketing lies as they continue to find ways to keep customers on their software.

And Bill Hilf is no friend of any OSS by virtue of who he accepted a job from and what that job is. IMO.

LoB

And now the commercial...

[JoeCommodore]

Bill Hilf comes from around from a rack of servers, "Hi there, I'm Bill Hilf, General Manager of Server Marketing here at Microsoft, and Linux 'Good Guy'."

"We here at Microsoft are taking the cold Linux air out of data rooms by employing more than double the Servers running Windows, to make things warm - and quite pretty I might add - with all these blinking lights. Not just those pale green lights you see on Linux servers, but also the bright red and yellow flashing indicators and those reassuring alarms that let you know you are important and not lazy."

Walking over to the rack he turns back to the camera, "Why use Linux and run everything on a single box and worry about having it fail when you can have the same stuff run on eight computers, like this..."

Motioning to the rack full of blades, "One for the Files, one for the Microsoft license validation and tracking, this one here is for serving web pages, this is half the email service, the other one is to handle the other half, spam and viruses for the first, over here is the one for user authentication, Muti-media on this one... my, what big wires! And this one was provided by the federal government to ensure your security, I'm not quite sure what it does, but it is included free with every installation!"

"Now all that 'technology' looks a whole lot more 'professional' than that one box over there, just think of that big data center with that one box, think of your job with just one box, pretty terrifying isn't it... I bet now you are getting the picture...", Hilf smiles as a toll free number appears on the bottom, "Call us today and our sales rep will tell your boss the 'truth'", winks, "... about Linux and how Microsoft keeps YOU 'competitive'."