A tour of the Microsoft open source lab [LWN.net]

A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

Posted Mar 21, 2008 6:59 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
Parent article: A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

I work with routers and both Cisco and Juniper both have the other company's gear in their test labs. As you'd expect since ISPs demand that routers interoperate. Why should it shock me that Microsoft has Linux servers in its lab? I suppose because Microsoft doesn't have the same reputation for interoperability.

The elephant in the room unanswered by this blog entry is what use Microsoft makes of its Linux test lab. Is the result better interoperation better or worse? The results to date suggest deliberately worse interoperation is the result of Microsoft's better understanding of Linux systems.

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Interop success

Posted Mar 21, 2008 14:45 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

One example we know of, which presumably used this lab (although it's possible they originally
acted on reports from a customer running pre-release software) is a bug in Samba. A
typographical mistake meant that Samba incorrectly handled a type of message which wasn't yet
being used by shipping Microsoft CIFS clients (it was to be introduced in Vista). When tested
with clients which did use the feature IIRC it caused directory listings to be truncated.

Microsoft eventually made the decision not to use the feature supported by this new message
type, in part because it was unreliable with Samba†, and there are large enterprise customers
running Samba. So that's an interop success story, although not one that reflects very well on
Free Software in this case.

† Obviously the Samba team fixed this, but that only helps people with new installs, or who
know to update their system (which may be a black-box storage device they bought from some
Taiwanese outfit). So Microsoft decided it wasn't practical to go ahead. You should be able to
find the long debates about this on Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog if you're
interested.

Interop success

Posted Mar 21, 2008 17:54 UTC (Fri) by 3vi1 (guest, #39830) [Link]

So what you're saying is:  Microsoft didn't use a (apparently so important that it was never
used before) feature because *Vista* clients would not have suffered in the interoperability
area.

If I were MS, I would have just implemented the feature, and add a registry flag to allow
Vista clients to fall back to "the old way" if a company needed those clients to talk to
Samba.  This would have allowed the companies to fix the problem either (preferably) at the
server or client side.

I highly doubt that customers with very large MS contracts do not have either the in-house
expertise to upgrade Samba themselves, or the support contracts to upgrade their "black-box"
devices.

Interop success

Posted Mar 21, 2008 19:34 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Actually, what Microsoft did makes business sense: if they'd used the option, some of their
customers would have found that switching from XP to Vista breaks the client on their network.
This would contribute to slow adoption of Vista, which has been a real problem for them. It's
much better politically for them to do it in SP 2 or something, by which point their users
will probably have upgrades Samba for other reasons anyway and when it doesn't reflect badly
on Vista in general if there are awkwardnesses.