"This exploit means nothing to very little the average user simply because no remote services are enabled by default. I'm using a 10.2.8 box right this minute and I had to enable Remote Login and Personal File Sharing."
This exploit means a ton to the average user; the directory server you authenticate too can dictate what mount points you have.. allowing me to have target machines mount all sorts of interesting things. Bad, bad scene.
As far as the timeline for releasing the vulnerability goes, it appears he told Apple he was planning on publishing the vulnerability.. and got no response. I imagine that, had they responded with something along the lines of "Sorry, it has to go through our testing pipelines first, and the absolute earliest we can do it is December" things might have gone differently.
It's easy to try and draw parallels between the business models of Eazel and Ximian at first glance. Both were attempting to build free software projects that they could then bundle pay-to-play services into.
The difference, though, is the application they are building and the types of services they are going to be selling. Eazel decided to bundle services into the file manager... this means things like package management, and online storage. Anyone who pays attention to most of the massive free storage systems knows that they are not making a ton of cash... most of what they do make is ad revenue. Storage is cheap; online storage is neat, but not *that* neat. Package management? Great for systems that don't have good package management already, but most linux distro's (and even the BSD's) have this pretty well covered as well.
Ximian, though, took the PIM application. What kind of things do you bundle with a PIM app? Calenders, Shared whiteboards, Task management, Mail. How many large corporate enterprises who don't have these services? If you were shopping around for an Exchange clone (because we all know how great exchange is) and someone pointed you to this great application with a flexible front end, a shared calender and all the other services you would be missing? Goldmine. Let end users pay a small amount to use the services; it proves the scalability. Corporations purchase the whole package, outsourcing the infrastructure to Ximian. Take Microsoft's revenues from Exchange *alone* and you could have a pretty successfull company.:)
The business model is sound. Eazel's flaw, IMHO, was the application and services they choose to target. Ximian, on the other hand, looks to me like a sound prospect.
Granted, this is all supposition... I don't work for Eazel or Ximian, nor do I know any of the principals. Sure makes sense to me, though.
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"This exploit means nothing to very little the average user simply because no remote services are enabled by default. I'm using a 10.2.8 box right this minute and I had to enable Remote Login and Personal File Sharing."
This exploit means a ton to the average user; the directory server you authenticate too can dictate what mount points you have.. allowing me to have target machines mount all sorts of interesting things. Bad, bad scene.
As far as the timeline for releasing the vulnerability goes, it appears he told Apple he was planning on publishing the vulnerability.. and got no response. I imagine that, had they responded with something along the lines of "Sorry, it has to go through our testing pipelines first, and the absolute earliest we can do it is December" things might have gone differently.
It's easy to try and draw parallels between the business models of Eazel and Ximian at first glance. Both were attempting to build free software projects that they could then bundle pay-to-play services into.
:)
The difference, though, is the application they are building and the types of services they are going to be selling. Eazel decided to bundle services into the file manager... this means things like package management, and online storage. Anyone who pays attention to most of the massive free storage systems knows that they are not making a ton of cash... most of what they do make is ad revenue. Storage is cheap; online storage is neat, but not *that* neat. Package management? Great for systems that don't have good package management already, but most linux distro's (and even the BSD's) have this pretty well covered as well.
Ximian, though, took the PIM application. What kind of things do you bundle with a PIM app? Calenders, Shared whiteboards, Task management, Mail. How many large corporate enterprises who don't have these services? If you were shopping around for an Exchange clone (because we all know how great exchange is) and someone pointed you to this great application with a flexible front end, a shared calender and all the other services you would be missing? Goldmine. Let end users pay a small amount to use the services; it proves the scalability. Corporations purchase the whole package, outsourcing the infrastructure to Ximian. Take Microsoft's revenues from Exchange *alone* and you could have a pretty successfull company.
The business model is sound. Eazel's flaw, IMHO, was the application and services they choose to target. Ximian, on the other hand, looks to me like a sound prospect.
Granted, this is all supposition... I don't work for Eazel or Ximian, nor do I know any of the principals. Sure makes sense to me, though.