must purchase and run a Microsoft Windows 2000 Kerberos Server, even if they already have another Kerberos implementation in use.
For Hill, that amounts to Microsoft gratuitously tying the desktop to the server.
"Microsoft has created a system that forces Morgan Stanley and many other government and academic institutions to run Microsoft servers," he says. "These organizations now have to duplicate essentially the same data into two separate systems."
As Hill sees it, this way of implementing Kerberos shatters the notion of an interoperable "standard." And the licensing restrictions Microsoft has imposed on publishing the data-field information mean that it still isn't a standard at all.
"It's a clear demonstration that Microsoft has no intention of changing its business practices," says Hill. "It's using its monopoly on the desktop to force people to use its server."
Meanwhile, the Open Source geeks who published the material on Slashdot in violation of Microsoft's license are up against the same Digital Millenium Copyright Act that brought Napster to heel. Claiming copyright violation, Microsoft has asked Slashdot for "immediate action to remove the cited violations" from its servers.
Slashdot is crying censorship and is consulting its lawyers before commenting further, but Microsoft is dismissing any First Amendment arguments.
"It's not about free speech. We're not asking for people's comments to be pulled down," says Microsoft spokesperson Adam Sohn, "It's the manner in which the [copyrighted information] is being distributed that we're asking Slashdot to address."
The fracas, which has generated enough protest posts to slow down the Slashdot servers, does raise a puzzling question. Why does Microsoft believe that the thing to do with "confidential information and a trade secret" is to publish it on the Internet?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that, as early as 1998, Microsoft executives made a public commitment to publish the Kerberos details. Now Microsoft can claim that - in its own way - it has met that commitment.
