[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Microsoft's Role in the XML Community (WAS RE: Important: The SAXC++
"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote, re Microsoft's role: > They have a role in the XML (more precisely, Kerberos) > community which they fulfilled by working with MIT on Kerberos. I'm not sure we're speaking the same language here :-), but to your point about the legality of Microsoft's behavior: Microsoft worked with MIT on Kerberos--an open standard that allows network clients of heterogeneous kinds all to leverage a single central authentication service called a KDC. It is a platform-neutral proto- col, and the KDC and clients may run under any operating system you want them to (at least in theory). Microsoft's "enhancements" actually break interoperability. If you use Microsoft's version of Kerberos, it becomes difficult, e.g., to use an MIT KDC with W2K clients. My suspicion (unconfirmed) is that the engineers at Microsoft were as miffed about what happened as the higher ed community now is. Anyway, whether they were right or wrong in a legal sense, the fact is that there was a deep sense of betrayal, not only to the people involved, but more generally to the cause of open protocols and standards (of which XML is one). My point is merely (vis-a-vis David Megginson's comments) that if a some Microsoft engineers return phone calls, and seem interested in what you're doing, this doesn't really tell us much about how all the high-level business decisions will pan out as far as XML and the XML community go. So there is cause for hope here and cause for concern. We should simply be wise. -- Richard Goerwitz Richard_Goerwitz@B... *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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