As promised, the message from Alex Hudson to FSF Europe's Discussion list.
To: discussion@fsfeurope.org Subject: Re: Very Worried at MS .net
On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 01:10:27AM +0100, Alistair Davidson wrote:
.NET is a framework (VM, development tool, and standards suite) for developing and deploying "web services"
Not quite accurate - and this is why most people are confused. Ignore the marketing - .NET is the new Windows API. It provides a platform for web services, yes, but that's only one aspect of it. MS are pushing the web stuff hard, because it's a pretty new feature for them, but the other stuff shouldn't be ignored.
Hailstorm and Passport are .net services - .net is as network integrated as you like, some things will only work over the network, some things will be local only. Hailstorm and Passport are two examples of .net services which are network-enabled.
One presumes that 3rd parties will be able to run HailStorm and Passport-style services (MS claims that the HailStorm protocol is open, at least).
Hailstorm, I think you're right in saying, is open. Passport definitely isn't - and I would imagine that MS will want to keep it that way. Whether or not it can be reverse engineered depends on how well it's been done, I would suspect not.
There's no obvious reason, from the user or developer's end of things, for MS to do this.
I would forget the .net == Office For Rent scenario, it's not going to happen. Microsoft are too clever for that.
I'm not sure about passport, but how hard would it be to reverse-engineer the thing if it's closed?
Given it's supposed to be engineered around PKI, I would be surprised if it was reverse-engineerable, although it might be possible. I would assume, though, that MS will have gone to lengths to prevent people getting into it at a protocol level.
Cheers,
Alex.