Re: fascism

[Christopher Hicks <chicks@chicks.net>]

I'm replying to an off list message on list since I think this summarizes 
a number of the issues I've brought up and ends on a more positive note.

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Digant Kasundra wrote:
> I think you are off base here.

I think you're mistaken.

> OpenLDAP uses standard LDAP and any product that claims to support LDAP 
> should be able to talk to OpenLDAP just as it would any other LDAP 
> directory.  However, the specifics as to how information needs to be 
> structured depends on the application itself and is therefore best 
> discussed on lists setup specifically for that application.

But there are no lists for Outlook admins.  A web forum is not a list. 
And if Microsoft is sponsoring it neither a web forum nor a mailing list 
will do you much good.  How would YOU feel if somebody said "hay, go get 
help from Microsoft"?  Does that not even sound a little like "screw off" 
to you?  Honestly?

> It is also off base to expect OpenLDAP to spend time and money 
> supporting other vendor for-profit applications.

That's not what I'm expecting.  I'm expecting openldap to let openldap 
users help each other without kicking them to the curb.

> The problem and frustration you are experiencing is because Microsoft 
> products do not interoperate well with non-MS products, and when they 
> do, MS does not document it well, and if you ask questions, MS will not 
> answer you.  Your problem is with Microsoft.

Admittedly.  Generally speaking when I've had problems with interopating 
with Microsoft the only place there was any hope of getting help was the 
relevant mailing list.  Take samba for instance.  Samba mailing list 
members don't seem to have any qualms about discussing interoperability.

> I'm sorry by your frustration.  I'm sorry if your inability to make a 
> for-profit Microsoft product work has turned you off to open source.

I'm hardly turned off to open source.  I'm writing this email in pine on a 
Fedora Core 2 box.  I'm going to use other open source tools like tcpdump 
and ethereal to sniff the LDAP packets between Outlook and OpenLDAP and 
post the solution.  If ethereal doesn't show enough of what's going on in 
the LDAP packets I'll use Perl's LDAP implementation to talk to AD.  No 
amount of fascism will turn me off to open source.  It only makes me 
fonder of it.  Freedom is good.  Fascism is bad.  Repeat.  Rinse.

Considering the people that might be turned off by Kurt's attitude is a 
conversation that might be worth having.

> Perhaps you might want to look at using an actual open source product 
> and ask people on that list now to properly setup your directory 
> information tree to make it work.  In other words, the way open source 
> would work would be to discuss problems setting up OpenLDAP here, and 
> problem setting up an email client (Evolution or Mozilla, perhaps) on 
> those mailing lists.

We haven't had any trouble getting mozilla or pine to talk to openldap. 
Getting the open source pieces of this working was amazingly straight 
forward IMHO.  I'm quite pleased with what I've gotten done in the last 
week in regard to LDAP.  I wish I had been using using it years ago.
My next task will be to get sendmail to share virtusertable entries and 
local-host-names across a few boxes.  If I can spread my mail load out and 
having the front end boxes send the mail directly to its destination I 
will be in redundancy nerdvana.  Here I go.

--
</chris>

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make 
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way 
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
 -- C.A.R. Hoare