That's exactly why Micro$oft wants to keep the details of their "proprietary"
extension to Kerberos private, they'd rather break interoperability and keep
their customers locked in than chance the risk that customers would move
if it were easily possible. Slashdot's providing a forum that threatens that
information control is thus very threatening to M$, hence the attempt to
bully Slashdot on this issue.
Personally I'm hoping Microsoft doesn't back off, or that they go far
enough before they do back off to provide Slashdot an opportunity
to take aggressive countermeasures, especially with the antitrust
issues as a backdrop I'd also be interested in seeing if the Kerberos
code base used by Microsoft might be tainted from open sources
that they've misused - 'twould make for some interesting discovery
motions if it came to suits and countersuits!
Also, the whole Kerberos interoperability issue, and Microsoft's
handling of the "proprietary" extensions that affect it, strikes to the
heart of the claims that their monopoly is good for innovation and
free enterprise and all that blather. Hopefully this one can be used
to demonstrate the fallacy of their claimed comsumer benefits, or
at least to show the cost to consumers of their anti-competitive
behavior. Slashdot may be a good place for this!
Here's hoping!
--Bruce McCulley
Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Standards are another thing. The market leader always wants to eschew
> standards. IBM used to do this in the mainframe business. Back in the
> '60s, the standard was ASCII, and IBM used EBCDIC, the standard for
> databases was network, IBM went hierachial. There were other things
> also. We see Microsoft doing this with languages like C and BASIC.
> They do it with email and with networking, with web hosting. They even
> violate their own standards. Some of this is deliberate, some is
> engineering expedient.
>
> Microsoft does not have a strong management directive to follow
> standards, and being the market leader, they have an economic reason
> to depart from standards. Since deoparting from a given standard sets up
> a defacto standard that only Microsoft is following tends to lock in their
> customers. Another area that IBM was famous for doing was subverting
> standards. Their rep on a standards committee would attempt to steer
> the standards committee in the opposite direction froim where IBM was
> going.
> On 5 Jun 2000, at 9:29, Warren Mansur wrote:
>
> > It's the typical Microsoft thing. Take a standard, make it slightly
> > incompatible, and then try to make their incompatible version the new
> > standard. They tried that with Java already (and failed thank
> > goodness).
> Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Associate Director
> Boston Linux and Unix user group
> http://www.blu.org
>
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