Supernova

Sam Ramji — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:22:00 GMT

I’m writing this from EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, where I’m going to announce the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation.

This started about a year ago when I met Mike Milinkovich at an open source event (the Open Source Software Think Tank 2007) where we were seated at the same table, and assigned to discuss “key issues inhibiting the growth of open source”. We found we had pretty similar ways of looking at problems – I found Mike to be very pragmatic and straightforward in his thinking. That discussion led to a conversation about what we could do to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows.

At the same time, the CardSpace team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the web – an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use identity layer for the Internet.

Currently, Higgins, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies and projects are in the midst of the third OSIS-sponsored user-centric identity interop, where we all try our code together, providing the data needed to improve both our implementations and the interoperability between them.

Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.

This is exciting to me – as a Java developer in my prior life (as well as the first technical marketing manager for BEA’s WebLogic Workshop, now Apache Beehive) it just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer. There will be more to come from the conversations that Eclipse and Microsoft have begun, and I look forward to announcing those in the future as we have demonstrable technology results.

Cheers,
Sam

Oil and Water?

admin — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 23:35:00 GMT

Oil and Water?

It’s been an interesting week for Interop inside the lab – we’re running an IPSEC interoperability project to test Fedora, OpenSUSE, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, and Mandriva with Windows Networking technology, and ran interviews both with the IDMU (Identity Management for Unix) Program Manager and with Paul Moore, CTO of Centrify.

Today I spoke with Jeremy Moskowitz, a Windows/Linux interoperability expert, to get his take on some of the recurring challenges in starting interop projects and why it matters. He’s done a lot of work on the topic of group policy, and writes books and teaches on-site classes for IT professionals.

Sam: What's the main thing that you find people don’t understand about Windows/Linux interop?

Jeremy: People often don’t realize how many points of contact between the two systems you can actually interoperate. I wrote a book with Thomas Boutell, and in 10 chapters we isolated 8 points, including desktop, applications, email, networking and authentication.

Sam: Authentication is an interesting topic – what do you lay out as the main approaches here?

Jeremy: There are a lot of different approaches. For example, if it’s a “mostly Linux” shop that needs to integrate a couple of Windows machines, you’d use OpenLDAP. If it’s a mixed Windows and Linux/Unix shop running Active Directory, integrate Linux & Unix systems as Windows clients.

Sam: Do you cover that in the book? Are you using IDMU to run a Windows NIS master?

Jeremy: When we wrote the book, Win2K3 R2 hadn’t shipped and SFU was a separate application. We decided to write a chapter on updated procedures for Win2K3 R2 as a download from www.winlinanswers.com. It should be available in May, so check back often.

Sam: What do you usually see as the main obstacle in IT shops to do Windows and Linux integration?

Jeremy: Windows and Linux guys in a given company don't talk much – they usually only meet up playing softball on opposite teams at the company picnic.

Sam: Sounds like some cultural interop issues?

Jeremy: There has historically been a religion problem which causes problems in doing these things. I'm a pragmatist - I have Windows running a bunch of systems but my website runs on LAMP. I needed a great web designer and a site he could maintain, and what he knew was PHP.

Sam: What's one great thing people will get out of reading your book?

Jeremy: When I gave my session on interop at LinuxWorld, I asked the audience of about 70 people: “Who here is running Exchange?” 60 people raised their hands. I said, “Keep your hands up. Now drop your hand if you're planning on walking away from your Exchange infrastructure and just to have something that runs on Linux.” One person dropped their hand. Exchange is here and people need to manage it.

So the question is, “How do we use Linux to manage the exchange environment?” In the book we detail an approach that uses a front end Linux server that will, for free, scrub email, scan for viruses, and verify the delivery address for routing across backend mail servers (Exchange, sendmail, etc). You offload things that typically run on the Exchange server and bog it down. By using a Linux box to front-end Exchange, you get more horsepower out of your Exchange server so that you get better performance for what you're paying for.

You can see Jeremy’s new site at http://www.winlinanswers.com, or see other stuff he’s done at http://www.moskowitz-inc.com Jeremy will be answering comments on this thread, so if you have some tough questions about AD interop, OpenLDAP, Samba 3.0, SFU, or related topics, this is the place to ask.

Cheers,
Sam

Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Sam Ramji, Identity and Authentication

Supernova

Oil and Water?