SambaXP 2007 Report, Day 2

Kai Blin kai.blin at gmail.com
Wed Apr 25 04:07:56 CDT 2007


Hi folks,

time for the second part of the SambaXP status report.

On tuesday, I had the chance to talk to Sam Ranji from Microsoft at lunch.

He is leading the open source compatibility lab at Microsoft, a lab running 
only open source software. He told us that he was at SambaXP to figure out 
how Microsoft could help the Samba community and Samba customers.

The conversation was very polite, but not very much to a point. Sam seems to 
be pretty reasonable about talking to the open source community, but there is 
only so much he can do on the Microsoft side. Microsoft seems to acknowledge 
that there is need for a product like Samba out there and it looks like they 
have decided to play along. Sam mentioned that there were some bugs in Vista 
that severely hurt Samba interoperability and that Microsoft fixed them prior 
to the Vista release.

Simo Sorce then pointed out some cases where Microsoft used to cooperate with 
Samba and now stopped talking. Dan Shearer told an amusing anecdote about one 
project manager at Microsoft who wanted to use ports > 1024 for privileged 
services, and how Tridge wrote a perl script exploiting this potential 
vulnerability, before it even existed. 

Sam seems to be really interested in cooperating with Samba in the area of bug 
reports, and see where the cooperation can go from there. While this doesn't 
mean much for Wine, it seems like Microsoft finally is accepting that they 
can't just will open source software away. We will see how this develops.

----

Centeris is producing Centeris Likewise, a product that supports managing 
Linux/Unix products using standard Windows administration tools. Centeris' 
Krishna Ganugapati had a fast-paced talk about Likewise and named a couple of 
requirements for porting their .NET/Mono based management applications to 
Linux. Among the things they need are a library similar to netapi32, a 
library doing DCE/RPC and remote named pipes. Now, if you remember part 1 of 
my report, remote named pipes is something I already got started on.

Talking to Krishna after his talk, we both realized that cooperating in this 
area will give Centeris a way to port their product and Wine a way to just 
thunk to a native library instead of reinventing the wheel. Centeris is happy
to fund development in that area and then release this under a free license.
I will get into that some more after SoC.

----

Most conversations I had in the breaks and at the social event are not really 
interesting from a Wine point of view, but we will see how that develops 
after my talk this afternoon.

Signing off to listen to another interesting talk,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin, <kai Dot blin At gmail Dot com>
WorldForge developer    http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer          http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin/
--
Will code for cotton.
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