"We built Windows Vista in compliance with these rules, and we will continue to adhere to the decree's requirements."

Uh YEAH! Naturally! That's why nobody but Microsoft has kernel access and only Microsoft knows how to make stuff work under W1nd0Wz pH1sT4 ....

It isn't going to work, folks. All you're doing is giving Microsoft another revenue stream in the form of licensing MS "standards" and slapping the interoperability moniker on the idea.

I keep thinking about what would be better for the competition. We have Solaris, Linux, BSD, all the proprietary Unices and a few other disparate clones of clones hardly worth mentioning. One thing they all seem to have in common is that they support well documented open standards and they (mostly) work well with each other on a heterogenous network; NIS, NFS (RFC 1094), Kerberos, LDAP et al. Linux is, or was the last time I checked, annoyingly deviating from the NFS standard by rejecting anything larger than 8 byte NFS locking cookies, but I digress into one of my many pet hates of Mr. Torvalds' bid for world domination.

Better for the competition would be withdraw from this anti-trust saga completely. It was a mis-managed hodge-podge of litigation and typical US court double-speak. Just mandate open standards for interoperability for all government applications and sit back to watch the fallout. Microsoft will either fall into line or become irrelevant. That's how one forces interoperability, not handing them "reasonable and equitable" revenue on a plate making their farcical attempts at ramming proprietary standards such as CIFS (OK, I know, but still...) and AD down everyone's throat seem legitimate. That is, of course, assuming the .gov admins can do more that sit and stab at dcpromo's point-and-drool interface. Perhaps this is the argument's Achilles heel?

Oh, and let's have some sort of browser service for NFS, please. This is 2008 and not everyone wants their remote shares in fstab, or even wishes to know fstab exists, although it does vastly simplify security and administration from the BOfH's point of view. Avahi/mDNS FTW?

Chickens meet Fox.

// mine's the fur coat as is the coonskin hat with the surrey on top

"We built Windows Vista in compliance with these rules, and we will continue to adhere to the decree's requirements."

I see no it's not it's hardly even close of course thats nothing compared to their other lies such as "it's a finished operating system".I think what they meant to say was we skirted the rules neatly except where we had to completely ignore them.

It's not a complete solution, but autofs+nfs isn't half bad for doing NFS without fstab. Next time you're on Solaris, type "ls /net/peer-hostname" and you'll see what the peer host exports. This also works on Linux, but at least in Debian it's not configured out of the box.

Thanks for the tip. I'll try that the next time I fire up the Solaris box.

Thanks are also due to Apple for this little gem:

http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/sources/autofs/README.TXT - isn't that nice of them?

That judge could sit on Microsoft for another ten years, I don't see that it's been of any use in the real world.

Of sure, Microsoft has a "compliance" department, which cooks up a new "we're being nice, see ?" press release every now and then that has to be approved by the judge or something.

And ?

Ever since the DoJ lost its balls and forgot to go after Microsoft for what really counted, this whole affair has been just a lot of hot air and a revenue stream for a bunch of lawyers - who are the only ones who have gotten anything out of it.