[2323] in Kerberos
Re: Kerberos Version 5 Proposal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
Fri Oct 30 17:57:38 1992
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 17:55:09 -0500
From: tytso@Athena.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
To: Steve Lunt <lunt@ctt.bellcore.com>
Cc: kerberos@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Steve Lunt's message of Fri, 30 Oct 92 14:19:43 EST,
One comment which I would like to make:
I would like to urge all prospective vendors to consider making
enhancements to Kerberos freely redistributable, and not to make them
proprietary. Furthermore, I would also urge Bellcore to consider
including this as a requirement to their prospective vendors.
A short-term analysis might suggest that proprietary changes to
Kerberos would be (1) possibly cheaper to Bellcore and (2) more
profitable to the prospective vendor. However, Kerberos derives and
adds all of its value through being in a distributed environment.
Therfore, interoperability is extremely important --- which means that
open systems tend to be much more successful than proprietary ones.
X11 and the Free Software Foundation software suite stand as an
important examples of how making enhancements back so that _all_ may
benefit from said enhancements can be very successful. Cygnus Support
is wonderful example of a company which makes all or most of its
enhancements public, by feeding them back to the FSF, and yet has been
quite successful.
Kerberos is currently being distributed in the same fashion as
BSD and X11; it can be freely FTP'ed and used without any restrictions
(as long as MIT's copyright is not removed and MIT is not held liable).
We do not require that changes made to Kerberos must be sent back to us.
However, even if you do not feel bound by a moral obligation to make
improvements generally available (as sites such as Sandia National Labs
have graciously done), in the long run it would be to your and
everybody's benefit to do so.
- Ted
