Windows future

[Stephen C Buckley]

On Aug 10, 2010, at 5:01 PM, Jeff Blaine wrote:

> Can anyone elaborate on MIT's or the consortium's plans
> regarding Kerberos for Windows?
> 
> The more detailed the better.
> 
> Any info would be appreciated.
> 
> Jeff Blaine

Hi Jeff,

I owe the community an explanation, so here goes.

The short answer is, that it is up in the air.  For many years, MIT privately put quite a lot of resources into funding development of KfW and NIM.  When we formed the Kerberos Consortium, things changed.  Suddenly, we had an open source project for Kerberos and, additionally an organization with members who invested both money and developer time.   I think it was great that MIT Kerberos was important enough to them that  they were willing to provide resources.  It also forced us to do some prioritization.

Although there are many institutions for whom KfW and NIM are very important, no one thus far has stepped forward, either as an organization or as an individual, and said that they feel strongly enough about either to enable  the work required to continue to make this a viable platform.

There are choices.  People could rally behind KfW and NIM and do work.  People could provide the resources that would enable the Kerberos Consortium to do the work.  People could wait and see if the perfectly good Kerberos implementation native to Windows becomes an option.  People could continue to rally behind a Heimdal Windows client implementation and do the work.  Or people could choose none of the above.  

s