[Gllug] More Microsoft FUD

[Alex Hudson]

On Thursday 08 November 2001 12:57 am, you wrote:
> "There's no common representation of a 'user' across all systems, sure, but
> the idea was that you don't pollute the Kerberos ticket with that local
> system's idea of what a user is. Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos
> actually wraps the authorization in the ticket. They subverted it and put
> it inside a standard ticket. The result was that only tickets issued on
> Windows 2000 machines could be useful on other Windows 2000 machines,
> without a lot of a manual mapping, which is a massive pain and is so
> tedious that no one is ever going to do it."

I think Jeremy was right: this is a valid point. But, any way you implement 
Kerberos, authentication is always a problem. So, if you have two Kerberos 
domains which use different authentication methods, it's the same problem. 
Seems like a lot of fuss about nothing: MS haven't made anything _worse_, 
because authentication in a Windows domain is already hard, and closed. 
Obviously, they get marks deducted for not making things _better_ (i.e., open 
:).

> Nothing false in this. It is their own declared policy. "Our standards are
> industry standards"  is their policy.

s/industry/defacto/ and they're right, more's the pity. I have no problem 
with MS setting standards, but I do have a problem with them using closed 
standards. The MSIL standard, for example, is now at ECMA (albeit it poorly 
documented), and many people (Ximian & GNU included) see this as an 
opportunity to solve many of our problems. MS appear to have no problem 
opening things up when it suits them; at one point I had high hopes that the 
DoJ would make it suit MS more often :(

> > We're better than that. Microsoft's anti-Apache benchmark studies prove
> > it Free software rules because a community can take criticism on the chin
> > where valid and make things right;
>
> only because people protest and fight about it.

Yes; but Microsoft's original criticisms were often quite valid. Although a 
lot of people wrote off their criticism because they were Microsoft, I don't 
think that's appropriate. That's not to say the majority of what they write 
isn't crap though :)

> > a company like MS needs to spin (doing
> > anything less would probably invoke the wrath of the shareholders).
>
> especially when a company has made such unrealistic profits for so long.

Precisely :( And continues to, as well.

Cheers,
						Alex.

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