Interop success [LWN.net]

Interop success

Posted Mar 21, 2008 17:54 UTC (Fri) by 3vi1 (guest, #39830)
In reply to: Interop success by tialaramex
Parent article: A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

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.

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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.