Nahh, it's Mandrake and SuSe. Redhat is aimed at the available corporate markets; servers and embedded devices. The support contracts that they want to talk about are all geared towards those two markets.
They'll load up code for desktops, but they really don't do that great a job of supporting it. (Ever try to build a multi-boot desktop with Redhat WITHOUT choosing a custom build?) In my view, they're leaving the desktop to everyone else for the time being. If it ever becomes profitable to support, they'll jump on it big time. Probably the most business aware vendor in the Linux space today.
In the meantime, I'm rooting for the KDE team, the Gnome team, the WINE team, the OpenOffice team, the Mozilla team, SuSe, and Mandrake to put together some completely open source desktop choices that can be installed easily. Frankly, we're much closer than most people outside our community think for every piece except WINE. If that one ever gets resolved, Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSe stand to make huge piles of dough as people convert desktops. If Judge Kotelly rules that Microsoft can no longer abuse the hardware vendors, those piles will become mountains!:) Woohoo! A free market in the truest sense!
"Linux is not totally mainstream yet....Linus himself admitted he would quit out of principal if it ever caught more then a third of the market."
Reference please. Every statement that I've ever seen from Linus was more along the lines of (paraphrasing), "If we end up replacing Microsoft on the desktop I think that will be good. Is that the reason that I developed Linux in the first place? No. Do I work every day to eliminate Microsoft? No. That's not why I still spend time on Linux. I do it because it's fun for me. I'll quit when it's no longer fun."
If you want to kick the tires on a absolutely fantastic single player FPS experience with a great storyline, check out Operation Flashpoint. Or, if your PC is a couple of years old, check out Half-Life.
Of the two, I preferred OFP. Many people swore by the original HL SP, though. It certainly had the best opening sequence of any game that I've ever seen.
The thing that both of these games that they were written as labors of love by a small handful of people.
Another game that I highly recommend is Combat Mission. This WWII tactical wargame was written almost completely by one individual. He did things that no one else had tried, and did it with style. The biggest knock on it is that its graphics look dated, but the gameplay is fantastic.
The reason that WINE is necessary in order to make Linux a significant player on the desktop is the huge installed base of existing apps that people and companies can't afford to abandon overnight. For example, I work for a financial institution with about 60,000 desktops. We have dozens (hundreds?) of canned apps that we bought from a wide spectrum of vendors.
These apps vary widely in both quality and support for current technology. We still have vendors successfully selling Btreive and NetBIOS based apps to our business units, for Pete's sake! I know of at least one case where we're still running Win 3.1 on about 100 desktops to support one of these ancient apps.
Why do the vendors get away with it? Frequently, the vendor is the only one, or one of two or three vendors, in a very small niche market. In other cases, the business unit failed to do a proper search of the market for choices, and/or they also failed to ask for help from the tech guys early in the product evaluation process. We too often find out about these problem apps AFTER the business unit has already signed a contract. Fortunately, that's very slowly changing for the better.
So, where does that leave us? Well, if we want to quit paying the Microsoft tax on the desktop, we absolutely need WINE. Otherwise, we're stuck. A good portion of the business world is in the same boat.
Home desktops, by contrast, could probably be cut over to Linux fairly painlessly if; a) people could sync their PDA of choice to the mail and calendar package of choice and b) the bulk of their favorite Windows games would install and play painlessly.
I have no clue whether anyone has addressed the PDA question fully, because it's not an area I personally care about. Some tweaked variant of WINE like WINEX, or compiled WINE with OpenGL hooks, is necessary to make the latter happen. Even then, I can't call the game install process painless yet.
So yes, while I disagree with a lot that Joel had to say in this interview, I have to reluctantly conclude that he's right on the money concerning his views about Linux on the desktop.
Heinlein said it best many times. Mother Nature is a bitch, and the human species is subject to her laws. Forget that fact at your peril.
Overpopulation in central Africa has been a problem for over a century. Poor to nonexistent government makes the problem much, much worse.
For example, has anyone else watching what's happening in Zimbabwe lately? You're about to see a country go right down the tubes. For months (maybe a couple of years) the legally elected president has been acting in a more and more despotic fashion. Now, in spite of every attempt to destroy a free election, he may still lose. If he does, you can count on him using his army of thugs to try to stay in power.
Zimbabwe has been a shining example of democracy and well run government compared to many of its neighbors. We're supposed to try to send food and medicine in to the mess that describes the rest? No roads to speak of across most of central Africa, heavily armed bandits everywhere who rob food convoys and shoot aid workers, cultures that encourage prostitutes to bathe their genitals in chlorine to provide a dry fuck for idiots who refuse to use condoms EVEN WHEN THEY ARE PROVIDED FREE OF CHARGE, and on and on and on.
Sorry, I don't believe that we can ask the various agencies to send in unarmed workers to feed the helpless, educate the children, and provide medicine to the idiots without some sort of stable society in place. Yet if anyone suggests that the UN spend money on soldiers, bombs, and bullets to eliminate the worst of the problems, weakminded individuals start crying and companies who thrive on the chaos start protesting.
Democracy is the best form of government we've been able to invent. Was it Churchill who said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest."? Sometimes, though, we need to remind ourselves that not everyone believes that. Some people really are so selfish that they will use any means possible to stay in power. Others hate anyone who doesn't look or think like them.
Most of the time, we have just let them stew in their own misery. If you're serious about your belief that "...basic health and survival - trump capitalism, intellectual property, and other protections..." you'd better be prepared to pay the price in dead UN soldiers. If you're young enough, you'd better be prepared to enlist or be drafted to serve this cause.
One factor that tends to get missed over and over again in these discussions is that there are a lot of medium sized and large businesses who would LOVE to get off the MS treadmill. They're tired of the license costs that continue to spiral up. They're tired of their LAN admins and server support people being beaten to death to deal with the latest security/privacy problem. They're tired of the fact that they have to hire 25% to 50% more people to manage the same number of servers. Unfortunately right now they can't.
Not because of MS Office. OpenOffice is close to the needed import capability, and the supported file formats make it possible to produce output that others can read.
Not because of perceived lack of support. IBM has been selling their support story to CIOs and CTOs for a year now.
Not because of desktop configuration issues. The toolsets for managing desktop images are becoming client neutral.
Not because of email or Web. Plenty of options for both.
Not because of training costs. We have to retrain people every time a new flavor of any major app comes out. Learning to use OpenOffice on KDE isn't any tougher to learn than MS Office on Win2K.
Right now, I see two areas that hold the bigger companies back; no enterprise wide calendar, and legacy app support.
There may be solutions to the first problem that I'm not aware of. However, iCal support seems to be close to nonexistent. Can anyone prove me wrong there?
The second area is much, much, MUCH more important than the slashdot crowd seems to realize. MS Office? Piffle! How about all the canned apps and in-house developed apps that we run our businesses on? You know, the ones that actually make us money?
Replace them with open alternatives, you say? Great! I'd love to! Show me those alternatives!
(crickets)
The finance industry is notorious for this. I know I've got salesmen talking to our business units right this second, telling them that their Btrieve database running on NetBIOS over NetBEUI will run swimmingly in my IP only WAN for thousands of clients. If I'm lucky, they've gotten around to porting their code to Win32 instead of 16 bit code for Win 3.x or (shudder) DOS.
Think I'm kidding? I spend major portions of my week telling people that we don't want to install this crap, but I'm in no position to say yay or nay. My boss's boss's boss is a real smart cookie who would love to see this shit disappear, but even he isn't in a position to say yay or nay. He is only responsible for working with the business units to figure out TCO, then figuring out how to install and support the final approved solution.
Many times, we are forced to install shit because the business unit went out and signed a contract, or because we're out of time, or because a better alternative just doesn't exist. When that happens, we end up hiding it behind M$ Terminal Services or Citrix, but that doesn't solve all of the problems.
We do have better behaved apps that run directly on our NT/ Win2K desktops that we will HAVE to support for a long time. The majority of it is is off the shelf, with some stuff that we developed in-house. You just don't flash cut hundreds of apps from the existing code base to open alternatives. It takes time.
The only cost effective way to do that is to use Wine or something else with a GPL license. Wine doesn't quite work yet after almost 10 years. When (not if. I have faith in that kind of tenacity.:) ) they finish, you will see a HUGE amount of pent up demand to move off of Microsoft.
So, in the end Bob Young is both right and wrong. The market today is in the specialized devices, in the server market, and in the embedded devices. However, the desktop isn't going away, and many businesses will migrate in a heartbeat when the last few problems are resolved.
You nailed it, sorta. The management team is looking to reduce the number of OSes/environments that we're currently supporting. We know we need OS/390, a couple of Unix flavors, and NT. OS/2 is DEFINITELY on the chopping block. Netware is regarded as vulnerable.
However, there's a strong technical contingent that loves eDirectory for all the right reasons, and is interested in Netware 6 (no Netware client required). However, no one that I've talked to that understands the company's infrastructure believes that we will be running native Netware servers in a few years.
Soooo, what's our alternative? I thought that the move to Win2k was a slam dunk until this guy stopped me in the hallway. This looks like a possible win for open source in a company that has historically avoided it. Who am I to turn away from the opportunity?
Re:Tolerance for Casualties
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
As a former member of the US Navy, there's a side to military preparedness that the military doesn't like to talk about in public, but those of us in uniform knew quite well. The fact is that if you are going to prepare for war, you will have a constant string of casualties. These casualties are the not necessarily the result of enemy or even friendly fire. Instead, they are result of training accidents, misfires, miscommunication, etc. How common are they?
Today, I don't know. 20 years ago, though, a typical carrier group lost at least one sailor a month. The rather grim joke (as all jokes in the military are) was that if a sailor got sucked through a jet engine the CAG (Commander, Air Group) wanted a new engine before he got the replacement sailor.
Mind you, no one in the military wants these casualties. For one thing, since it's not uncommon to have 3 and 4 generations of citizens go into the armed services. When someone dies in an accident it might be your kid, or your best friend's kid.
Still, no matter how tight the safety precautions, no matter how many times you check and doublecheck your targets, no matter how often you perform preventive maintenance, Bad Things sometimes Happen to Good People. You have to remember that people in ANY military routinely handle huge amounts of explosives and operate some of the largest and fastest vehicles ever created. Next time you see someone from your country in uniform, give him or her the respect that s/he deserves. That person deals with these risks every day to keep you safe.
Cisco and 3Com already sell this as a package deal. Both systems require that you buy their phone switch as well, though. At least, they did the last time I checked (early last year). I haven't been involved in that side of our network for a while, so my info may very well be out of date.
Yup, we trained him and a lot of others to act as our proxies, primarily against Communism. Anyone remember a little thing called the Cold War?
In addition, contrary to the beliefs of some misguided people, we have NEVER advocated the deliberate, wholesale slaughter of civilians by those proxies. They chose to do so on their own. Every last one that chose to do so was eventually abandoned.
Yes, I know that our country has done things in the past that we can't be proud of. I'm also fully aware that over time, we have become far more humane in our target selection while at war. Schwartzkopf made a telling point the other night while being interviewed by Brokaw. During the Gulf War, we put troops at risk rather than attack possibly civilian targets. These bastards (his word, not mine) went out of their way to kill the highest number of civilians that they could. THAT's the difference between them and us.
Rolling out retail systems on Linux, right? Home Depot is the largest with a planned 90,000 terminals by 2003. A good chunk of those will be POS, while others will be lookup stations.
I assume that HD will be using text only interfaces for the POS systems, but I don't know. It would be interesting to know what their plans are. Is anyone from their development team participating in any GPL code development?
A lot of you slashdotters are missing the point. Novell has the most scalable, most full featured LDAP directory in the world. Any company that supports millions of customers across dozens of products has to have that if they want to get serious on the Internet. AD won't do it. Microsoft says it will, but I don't think it's there yet. Slapd and Slurpd might, but the front end toolset to manage them isn't even close to being in the same league as NDS' ConsoleOne or even NWadmin. Novell's XML implementation, DirXML, seems to be pretty robust. Combine that with LDAP V3 updates, Novell's excellent partitioning and replication, and I think you've got a pretty convincing arguement for making an NDS cluster the center of your LDAP strategy.
If you have a homogeneous environment, i.e. all Linux, all *nix, or all NT, then a single LDAP solution is feasible. However, if you need to address an LDAP environment that needs to be coordinated between multiple platforms, then NDS cross platform capability looks even better.
Now think about policy based management. Why not use an LDAP directory (like NDS) that is specifically built to support it?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that's why CmdrTaco isn't playing anymore? :)
Nahh, it's Mandrake and SuSe. Redhat is aimed at the available corporate markets; servers and embedded devices. The support contracts that they want to talk about are all geared towards those two markets.
:) Woohoo! A free market in the truest sense!
They'll load up code for desktops, but they really don't do that great a job of supporting it. (Ever try to build a multi-boot desktop with Redhat WITHOUT choosing a custom build?) In my view, they're leaving the desktop to everyone else for the time being. If it ever becomes profitable to support, they'll jump on it big time. Probably the most business aware vendor in the Linux space today.
In the meantime, I'm rooting for the KDE team, the Gnome team, the WINE team, the OpenOffice team, the Mozilla team, SuSe, and Mandrake to put together some completely open source desktop choices that can be installed easily. Frankly, we're much closer than most people outside our community think for every piece except WINE. If that one ever gets resolved, Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSe stand to make huge piles of dough as people convert desktops. If Judge Kotelly rules that Microsoft can no longer abuse the hardware vendors, those piles will become mountains!
"Linux is not totally mainstream yet. ...Linus himself admitted he would quit out of principal if it ever caught more then a third of the market."
Reference please. Every statement that I've ever seen from Linus was more along the lines of (paraphrasing), "If we end up replacing Microsoft on the desktop I think that will be good. Is that the reason that I developed Linux in the first place? No. Do I work every day to eliminate Microsoft? No. That's not why I still spend time on Linux. I do it because it's fun for me. I'll quit when it's no longer fun."
If you want to kick the tires on a absolutely fantastic single player FPS experience with a great storyline, check out Operation Flashpoint. Or, if your PC is a couple of years old, check out Half-Life.
Of the two, I preferred OFP. Many people swore by the original HL SP, though. It certainly had the best opening sequence of any game that I've ever seen.
The thing that both of these games that they were written as labors of love by a small handful of people.
Another game that I highly recommend is Combat Mission. This WWII tactical wargame was written almost completely by one individual. He did things that no one else had tried, and did it with style. The biggest knock on it is that its graphics look dated, but the gameplay is fantastic.
The reason that WINE is necessary in order to make Linux a significant player on the desktop is the huge installed base of existing apps that people and companies can't afford to abandon overnight. For example, I work for a financial institution with about 60,000 desktops. We have dozens (hundreds?) of canned apps that we bought from a wide spectrum of vendors.
These apps vary widely in both quality and support for current technology. We still have vendors successfully selling Btreive and NetBIOS based apps to our business units, for Pete's sake! I know of at least one case where we're still running Win 3.1 on about 100 desktops to support one of these ancient apps.
Why do the vendors get away with it? Frequently, the vendor is the only one, or one of two or three vendors, in a very small niche market. In other cases, the business unit failed to do a proper search of the market for choices, and/or they also failed to ask for help from the tech guys early in the product evaluation process. We too often find out about these problem apps AFTER the business unit has already signed a contract. Fortunately, that's very slowly changing for the better.
So, where does that leave us? Well, if we want to quit paying the Microsoft tax on the desktop, we absolutely need WINE. Otherwise, we're stuck. A good portion of the business world is in the same boat.
Home desktops, by contrast, could probably be cut over to Linux fairly painlessly if; a) people could sync their PDA of choice to the mail and calendar package of choice and b) the bulk of their favorite Windows games would install and play painlessly.
I have no clue whether anyone has addressed the PDA question fully, because it's not an area I personally care about. Some tweaked variant of WINE like WINEX, or compiled WINE with OpenGL hooks, is necessary to make the latter happen. Even then, I can't call the game install process painless yet.
So yes, while I disagree with a lot that Joel had to say in this interview, I have to reluctantly conclude that he's right on the money concerning his views about Linux on the desktop.
Heinlein said it best many times. Mother Nature is a bitch, and the human species is subject to her laws. Forget that fact at your peril.
Overpopulation in central Africa has been a problem for over a century. Poor to nonexistent government makes the problem much, much worse.
For example, has anyone else watching what's happening in Zimbabwe lately? You're about to see a country go right down the tubes. For months (maybe a couple of years) the legally elected president has been acting in a more and more despotic fashion. Now, in spite of every attempt to destroy a free election, he may still lose. If he does, you can count on him using his army of thugs to try to stay in power.
Zimbabwe has been a shining example of democracy and well run government compared to many of its neighbors. We're supposed to try to send food and medicine in to the mess that describes the rest? No roads to speak of across most of central Africa, heavily armed bandits everywhere who rob food convoys and shoot aid workers, cultures that encourage prostitutes to bathe their genitals in chlorine to provide a dry fuck for idiots who refuse to use condoms EVEN WHEN THEY ARE PROVIDED FREE OF CHARGE, and on and on and on.
Sorry, I don't believe that we can ask the various agencies to send in unarmed workers to feed the helpless, educate the children, and provide medicine to the idiots without some sort of stable society in place. Yet if anyone suggests that the UN spend money on soldiers, bombs, and bullets to eliminate the worst of the problems, weakminded individuals start crying and companies who thrive on the chaos start protesting.
Democracy is the best form of government we've been able to invent. Was it Churchill who said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest."? Sometimes, though, we need to remind ourselves that not everyone believes that. Some people really are so selfish that they will use any means possible to stay in power. Others hate anyone who doesn't look or think like them.
Most of the time, we have just let them stew in their own misery. If you're serious about your belief that "...basic health and survival - trump capitalism, intellectual property, and other protections..." you'd better be prepared to pay the price in dead UN soldiers. If you're young enough, you'd better be prepared to enlist or be drafted to serve this cause.
That's gotta be a record. Oh, yeah. My condolences. :)
BTW, has she trained you to keep the seat down, yet?
One factor that tends to get missed over and over again in these discussions is that there are a lot of medium sized and large businesses who would LOVE to get off the MS treadmill. They're tired of the license costs that continue to spiral up. They're tired of their LAN admins and server support people being beaten to death to deal with the latest security/privacy problem. They're tired of the fact that they have to hire 25% to 50% more people to manage the same number of servers. Unfortunately right now they can't.
:) ) they finish, you will see a HUGE amount of pent up demand to move off of Microsoft.
Not because of MS Office. OpenOffice is close to the needed import capability, and the supported file formats make it possible to produce output that others can read.
Not because of perceived lack of support. IBM has been selling their support story to CIOs and CTOs for a year now.
Not because of desktop configuration issues. The toolsets for managing desktop images are becoming client neutral.
Not because of email or Web. Plenty of options for both.
Not because of training costs. We have to retrain people every time a new flavor of any major app comes out. Learning to use OpenOffice on KDE isn't any tougher to learn than MS Office on Win2K.
Right now, I see two areas that hold the bigger companies back; no enterprise wide calendar, and legacy app support.
There may be solutions to the first problem that I'm not aware of. However, iCal support seems to be close to nonexistent. Can anyone prove me wrong there?
The second area is much, much, MUCH more important than the slashdot crowd seems to realize. MS Office? Piffle! How about all the canned apps and in-house developed apps that we run our businesses on? You know, the ones that actually make us money?
Replace them with open alternatives, you say? Great! I'd love to! Show me those alternatives!
(crickets)
The finance industry is notorious for this. I know I've got salesmen talking to our business units right this second, telling them that their Btrieve database running on NetBIOS over NetBEUI will run swimmingly in my IP only WAN for thousands of clients. If I'm lucky, they've gotten around to porting their code to Win32 instead of 16 bit code for Win 3.x or (shudder) DOS.
Think I'm kidding? I spend major portions of my week telling people that we don't want to install this crap, but I'm in no position to say yay or nay. My boss's boss's boss is a real smart cookie who would love to see this shit disappear, but even he isn't in a position to say yay or nay. He is only responsible for working with the business units to figure out TCO, then figuring out how to install and support the final approved solution.
Many times, we are forced to install shit because the business unit went out and signed a contract, or because we're out of time, or because a better alternative just doesn't exist. When that happens, we end up hiding it behind M$ Terminal Services or Citrix, but that doesn't solve all of the problems.
We do have better behaved apps that run directly on our NT/ Win2K desktops that we will HAVE to support for a long time. The majority of it is is off the shelf, with some stuff that we developed in-house. You just don't flash cut hundreds of apps from the existing code base to open alternatives. It takes time.
The only cost effective way to do that is to use Wine or something else with a GPL license. Wine doesn't quite work yet after almost 10 years. When (not if. I have faith in that kind of tenacity.
So, in the end Bob Young is both right and wrong. The market today is in the specialized devices, in the server market, and in the embedded devices. However, the desktop isn't going away, and many businesses will migrate in a heartbeat when the last few problems are resolved.
See my reply to the same question earlier in the thread. Basically, it's not my decision to make, just to influence what the replacement is.
BTW, we've already moved more than half our user community off of IPX to IP on Netware 5.
You nailed it, sorta. The management team is looking to reduce the number of OSes/environments that we're currently supporting. We know we need OS/390, a couple of Unix flavors, and NT. OS/2 is DEFINITELY on the chopping block. Netware is regarded as vulnerable.
However, there's a strong technical contingent that loves eDirectory for all the right reasons, and is interested in Netware 6 (no Netware client required). However, no one that I've talked to that understands the company's infrastructure believes that we will be running native Netware servers in a few years.
Soooo, what's our alternative? I thought that the move to Win2k was a slam dunk until this guy stopped me in the hallway. This looks like a possible win for open source in a company that has historically avoided it. Who am I to turn away from the opportunity?
As a former member of the US Navy, there's a side to military preparedness that the military doesn't like to talk about in public, but those of us in uniform knew quite well. The fact is that if you are going to prepare for war, you will have a constant string of casualties. These casualties are the not necessarily the result of enemy or even friendly fire. Instead, they are result of training accidents, misfires, miscommunication, etc. How common are they?
Today, I don't know. 20 years ago, though, a typical carrier group lost at least one sailor a month. The rather grim joke (as all jokes in the military are) was that if a sailor got sucked through a jet engine the CAG (Commander, Air Group) wanted a new engine before he got the replacement sailor.
Mind you, no one in the military wants these casualties. For one thing, since it's not uncommon to have 3 and 4 generations of citizens go into the armed services. When someone dies in an accident it might be your kid, or your best friend's kid.
Still, no matter how tight the safety precautions, no matter how many times you check and doublecheck your targets, no matter how often you perform preventive maintenance, Bad Things sometimes Happen to Good People. You have to remember that people in ANY military routinely handle huge amounts of explosives and operate some of the largest and fastest vehicles ever created. Next time you see someone from your country in uniform, give him or her the respect that s/he deserves. That person deals with these risks every day to keep you safe.
OK, tell us what's outdated about it. Curious minds want to know. :)
Cisco and 3Com already sell this as a package deal. Both systems require that you buy their phone switch as well, though. At least, they did the last time I checked (early last year). I haven't been involved in that side of our network for a while, so my info may very well be out of date.
Yup, we trained him and a lot of others to act as our proxies, primarily against Communism. Anyone remember a little thing called the Cold War?
In addition, contrary to the beliefs of some misguided people, we have NEVER advocated the deliberate, wholesale slaughter of civilians by those proxies. They chose to do so on their own. Every last one that chose to do so was eventually abandoned.
Yes, I know that our country has done things in the past that we can't be proud of. I'm also fully aware that over time, we have become far more humane in our target selection while at war. Schwartzkopf made a telling point the other night while being interviewed by Brokaw. During the Gulf War, we put troops at risk rather than attack possibly civilian targets. These bastards (his word, not mine) went out of their way to kill the highest number of civilians that they could. THAT's the difference between them and us.
Rolling out retail systems on Linux, right? Home Depot is the largest with a planned 90,000 terminals by 2003. A good chunk of those will be POS, while others will be lookup stations. I assume that HD will be using text only interfaces for the POS systems, but I don't know. It would be interesting to know what their plans are. Is anyone from their development team participating in any GPL code development?
A lot of you slashdotters are missing the point. Novell has the most scalable, most full featured LDAP directory in the world. Any company that supports millions of customers across dozens of products has to have that if they want to get serious on the Internet. AD won't do it. Microsoft says it will, but I don't think it's there yet. Slapd and Slurpd might, but the front end toolset to manage them isn't even close to being in the same league as NDS' ConsoleOne or even NWadmin. Novell's XML implementation, DirXML, seems to be pretty robust. Combine that with LDAP V3 updates, Novell's excellent partitioning and replication, and I think you've got a pretty convincing arguement for making an NDS cluster the center of your LDAP strategy. If you have a homogeneous environment, i.e. all Linux, all *nix, or all NT, then a single LDAP solution is feasible. However, if you need to address an LDAP environment that needs to be coordinated between multiple platforms, then NDS cross platform capability looks even better. Now think about policy based management. Why not use an LDAP directory (like NDS) that is specifically built to support it?