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Windows Server Trusts Samba4 Active Directory
Darren Ginter writes "A group of Samba v4 developers recently spent a week in Redmond to work with Microsoft on Active Directory interoperability(?!). The result? Windows Server will now join, trust and replicate a Samba-based Active Directory using Microsoft-native protocols. Although Samba v4 is still in the alpha stages, this is a huge step for open source. Or it could be a trap."
Proabably not. If Microsoft helped, then they'd have unclean hands.
But the supreme court may void software patents, so it might not spring.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Alright, I must be missing something obvious here, but I fail to see how this could turn out to be a trap ?
"Microsoft Windows" and "trust", do those two even go together?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I'm kind of surprised you don't get what's going on here. MS sees a way to make money from open source. I doubt they'll trumpet that from the rooftops, but I think it's exactly what's happening lately. This will be a selling point for Server 2008 and another reason for MS customers to upgrade from Sever 2003 to 2008. So this potentially has the ability to increase upgrade sales to existing customers and provide possible sales to new multi-platform customers.
Everyone is so worried about the MS of 10 years ago that I think they're missing the dynamic now. Free and/or Open Source software and platforms aren't going away. If you can't make your competition leave then you might as well capitalize on them and make money. MS has far more to gain from interoperability with Linux, BSD, and other open source platforms than they do from not working together (it's just taking a long time for the boardroom to move it in that direction). FOSS on the other hand has far less to gain, in my opinion, by working together and everything to gain by not making things work together since the main business model of FOSS is support service oriented.
I think what we're seeing with this and their VM offering is to make themselves a viable player with Linux in the server arena.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
I'm kind of surprised you don't get what's going on here. MS sees a way to make money from open source.
Get back to me in five years, and we'll see how this plays out. I'd love to see MS back away from its old policies, but they actually need to do it before I'll give them credit for it.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Hell freezes over annually.
Microsoft have been working with the Samba folks for some time. I suspect this is more to shut the EU up than because they really want to, but if that's their purpose then starting to enforce patents against the Samba team would almost certainly be a most efficient foot-shooting exercise.
If I am being perfectly honest, the only frustration (and I'm sure it's got more to do with a lack of resources than a lack of talent - Samba probably needs about four times as many developers who know the protocol backwards and inside out, problem is most of them probably work for Microsoft) is the glacial speed this is all moving at. AD was introduced with Windows 2000, the Samba team have been working on getting Samba 4 out for years and it's still only alpha code. Frankly, only being able to provide something equivalent to an NT4 domain looked quaint four years ago. Today it's downright embarrassing for anyone claiming that F/OSS is functionally equivalent to Active Directory.
(note to F/OSS advocacy trolls: I am well aware that AD is little more than LDAP/Kerberos under the hood. When you compose your flames, perhaps you would be so good as to explain exactly how one can manage a network full of Windows workstations with the level of control AD policies offer using nothing but F/OSS software which has reached a reasonable level of stability. NT4 policies are a pretty lousy substitute.)
Vendors is in quotes, as an open source project team really isn't a vendor.
True, but it also gives Microsoft the most bang for their buck, since by working with Samba developers, the information gets out there for everyone to see. If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft requires you to pay for their documentation. Samba's interoperability is documentation in a real sense (and source code is almost always better documentation than something that a technical writer came up with), and this lowers the barrier to getting that information. I think that the EU will view this favorably, which is probably why Microsoft is doing this.
As a side note-- my gut feeling is that nowadays, Microsoft's closed-off protocols are a hindrance to them. At this point in the game, the lock-in is well-known and I think that works against Microsoft with many sysadmins planning new deployments. If, on the other hand, there is a large and open software ecosystem, sysadmins will look on Microsoft products more favorably. E.g., Exchange is quite full-featured as a groupware platform, relatively scalable, and fairly easy to use, but lock-in, cost, and infrastructure requirements are problems. But if someone can set up a Samba4 AD and run Exchange on top of it-- or even better, the other way around-- now we're talking. Microsoft's attitude up to this point, though, has made many people (me included) simply work to ditch the existing Microsoft software we use.
I think the point here is that Microsoft's behavior is being driven by the market. The market is clearly saying that they like a lot of the FOSS solutions. If Microsoft tries to pretend like these solutions does not exist, then they will allow a software ecosystem to develop in which they have no influence. A dominant player simply cannot allow that to happen.
In the case of FOSS, there is no way to bankrupt or buyout the competition. They still try to compete with marketing FUD, but it is obvious that that is only good for trying to slow the growth of FOSS.
This isn't about Microsoft turning over a new leaf. The real story is that market acceptance of FOSS solutions has grown to the point where none of the major players (including Microsoft) can afford to ignore it. For someone like me who has used Linux seriously for 15 years, seeing this kind of growth and acceptance is amazing. Linux used to be ignored, but now it is respected.
In the case of FOSS, there is no way to bankrupt or buyout the competition. They still try to compete with marketing FUD, but it is obvious that that is only good for trying to slow the growth of FOSS.
That leaves the legal route, and that's what I'm worried may be employed here down the road. I hope the Samba developers obtained a rock-solid agreement allowing them to use the results of the collaboration in the Samba project, now and in the future. I'm concerned that the company may attempt, without the knowledge of the MS developers who probably had a blast doing this, to argue that anything in Samba4 written after this project having to do with AD interoperability is covered by patents relating to AD, or that it descends from MS intellectual property accessed while they were at Redmond, etc. IIRC, one of the Linux NTFS coders had to refrain from working on the functionality for some time after working at Microsoft due to contract stipulations, slowing the development of stable write capability (this was years ago, so I could be way off here).
I can see how this is a possible sign of a culture change at Microsoft (and for that company's sake, I hope the EEE culture is withering away), but I can also see a few ways this could go horribly wrong based on the company's past behaviour. Their future behaviour will determine whether this was a good idea, and that's why I remain skeptical.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Even the Mac vs. Windows commercials, they start out "Hi, I'm a Mac," "And I'm a PC." Microsoft has very skillfully indoctrinated the PC-buying public in the USA to believe that Microsoft operating systems are the only thing that will run on an x86-based, non-Macintosh desktop computer.
"Choice" is anathema to Microsoft. Gates, Ballmer, Mundie, et alia want Windows on every PC in the world, and they are willing to use every means, legal or otherwise, to convince people (especially clueless executives) that there is no other system for a PC. In this, they were very successful for a long time. And, face it, a lot of people tolerate Windows in order to have computers on their desks, but how many actually like it?
Even if Microsoft were to admit openly that PC's can run other OS's, the sheer inertia Windows has today is going to take a while to overcome.
So a company received money from MS after negotiating and signing an agreement and it's MS's fault that they are going under because they refuse to give them more money.
As far as IBM and MS are concerned, it was always an uncomfortable alliance and it wasn't as if the larger IBM wasn't used to playing hardball in the big leagues.
Besides, it was clear that IBM didn't didn't consider OS/2 to be a priority because they were very quiet in their promotion of it. There had more ads for the PC jr (with its chicklet keyboard) than OS/2.
... but it can replace Windows on the server as Unix and Linux are designed as server operating systems.
Unix (and by extension Linux) makes for an excellent general purpose operating system. Just because it was developed before desktops and graphical user interfaces doesn't mean that it isn't fully capable for such use any more or less than Windows (which was morphed from DOS). Mac OS X is an example of a very capable desktop operating system built on Unix. A general purpose operating system like Linux is "designed for" whatever people have built on top of it, and desktops running on top of *nix and X11 are not recent occurrences. Nowadays, X11-based desktops are extremely capable, and the development gap between Windows and such desktops has essentially been closed in the minds of many users.
So, let's drop the meme that Linux is designed for servers (thereby implying that it isn't designed for desktops or something). Instead, let's acknowledge that it is a good general purpose operating system which scales well from small devices to servers to desktops, and anything in-between. It just doesn't make sense to continue saying Linux was "designed as a server operating system" when it has really been designed for much more than that.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Can this in any way be related back to the fifth horseman: the EU competition regulators that demanded interoperability from Microsoft?