Some Days You Get the Bear...
...and some days the bear gets you.
Last week, I got wind of some issues regarding Samba's relationship with Microsoft, and drew some conclusions about the overall meaning of those issues. Unfortunately, it seems, my conclusions were wrong.
Although my speculation that Microsoft had not put forth a good faith effort based on its apparent reluctance to attend this month's SambaXP conference in Germany wasn't completely off the mark--based on the information I had. But, like some well-intentioned interventions, things were not quite as they seemed.
It is true, for instance, that Microsoft's Director of Platform Technology Strategy Sam Ramji made some remarks about Jeremy Allison's legal and political stance at MTS07—and it was very easy to read “If Jeremy [Allison] would just shut up, I could help him” as an attack. But in a broader, more accurate context, Ramji's remarks can also be read as frustration at not being able to do what he perceives as his job.
I gleaned all of this from an e-mail conversation I had with Ramji over this past weekend. (He invited me to talk on the phone, but I declined for lack of time.) I also gathered a lot of information from Jeremy Allison, who also e-mailed me about my last blog entry. Sam seemed more irked by the blog than Jeremy, though the Samba developer still took it seriously. Both of them confirmed something which my sources had not known: that Microsoft and the Samba Project have been talking to each other, trying to work things out.
In a nutshell, both Sam and Jeremy chided me for throwing fuel on the fire and potentially damaging a budding relationship. If that was indeed the result of my actions, then I certainly offer my apologies, for that was not my intent. My intent was pointing out a possible stalled relationship between the two sides, when apparently there was no stall at all.
From our discussions, I can tell you that there is indeed some effort by Microsoft to help Samba work better, though confidentiality prevents me from going into detail right now.
So, things aren't quite as bad as they seemed, which is always good. I think misunderstandings like this are going to be inevitable, because there is still a lot of distrust about and within Microsoft. It is easy for Linux advocates to point out all the various public statements and memos made by Microsoft executives about killing Linux and let that color our perceptions of the company as a whole.
And while I still firmly believe that people at the very top of Microsoft still have a ways to go before they truly accept Linux and its community, there is a real chance here for some of us in the community to reach out and take the hand offered by some of the Microsoft employees that really do think that interoperability is the way to go. Because the way we, as a community, slap those hands away all of the time is just going to breed mistrust about us.
This is all well and good as long as we continue to believe that the Wintel system is the be all and end all of computing.
I don't believe this for an instance, and I wish Wintel would go away and let the scientists and engineers back into the game they have been sidelined from for the last 20 years.
The web is supposed to be a grid of peer to peer nodes leased by ISPs to those who require highspeed cable interconnect, running a secure user space OS, and having a redundant fragmented file system for user data.
Human Interfaces are supposed to connect via cable or wireless to the local node in your own home or office and through the available power of sleeping user nodes, offer supercomputing to those who are awake.
Something inexpensive based on the Cell architecture would do for a node, and something based on Plan 9 would do for the web OS, and the only centralised bits would be something based on mainframes for storage management across the grid.
Everything else is corporate hijackers making money off peoples ignorance and need for stability.
It's a pity the systems don't have to fly, because then the hijackers would be grounded, and the scientists and engineers able to invent, develop and implement their real innovations again, instead of having to waste years of valuable time trying to inter-operate within a dumb network architecture.
Even if Wintel is not the be-all-end-all (and I don't believe it is), it still behooves Linux to learn how to work with it.
Your goals are laudable, but the world is not made up of entirely scientists and engineers, I fear.
BKP
"confidentiality prevents me from going into detail right now." The open source community does NOT work well with "confidentiality", especially when one side of this confidential agreement is Microsoft (or any other company convicted MULTIPLE TIMES of illegal business practices). If these guys want us to accept what they are doing, they should do it in the OPEN, not behind closed doors.
This is just a way for Microsoft to make its "Linux violates MS IP" claims true. I thought Jeremy Allison was against that sort of thing.
IT managers desperately want easy interoperability between Microsoft products, Linux and open source software. Microsoft has recognized this need, finally acknowledging that Linux isn't going away. However, Microsoft is only going to offer interoperability on its own terms, and those terms will always relegate Linux to second-class citizenship. Right now, it seems that Samba and virtualization are the primary ways to achieve interoperability in business environments. So, Red Hat starts working on Samba, and Novell works with Microsoft on virtualization. Likewise, the Samba folks want Microsoft to help out and don't want to offend the master of the interoperability domain.
Naturally, many Linux advocates believe that businesses should dump Microsoft products altogether. I don't think that's probable, but I do think Linux can gain an upper hand, thanks to virtualization. Once server-based desktop virtualization is proven, businesses can break the stranglehold of Microsoft Office desktop. That's the key to broader corporate adoption of Linux, and tipping the market share scales in favor of Linux will put more pressure on Microsoft to make interoperability easier.