LCA2009: Active Directory in Samba 4 'an old story'

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 20 January 2009 13:20

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft knew of the possibility that Samba 4 could supplant Active Directory years ago, hence it was unlikely that the company would feel that it posed any additional threat to Windows Server now, Samba founder Andrew Tridgell said today.
In an interview with iTWire on the sidelines of the 10th Australian national Linux conference, Tridgell said that the Samba project needed developers to make the implementation smoother.

He said the Samba team had had an interoperability session with Microsoft, with engineers from both sides working together. "Engineers are motivated by good engineering and I was pleased with the quality of person made available to our team," he said.

Tridgell said it was unlikely that Samba 4 would be able to offer every feature of Active Directory but that it would come pretty close.

Asked about recent comparisons between Samba and Mono - some say Miguel de Icaza's cloning of .NET and Tridgell's Samba are equivalents and that people who criticise one should also criticise the other - Tridgell said he had great respect for de Icaza and the quality of his work, especially in Mono.

"The difference lies in the fact that Miguel would do whatever it takes to create the best possible software, while I see ethical decisions as very important - even if it produces worse software," he said.

"If somebody came up with an academic paper that proved that proprietary methods delivered better software, I would still develop free software. And I suspect that Linus (Torvalds), even though he is seen as more of an open source person, would do so as well."

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