[ILUG] M$ SFU 3.5 - redistribution and passport?

[Liam Bedford]

Brian Foster wrote:

> does anyone have any experience with SFU 3.5 (the
> free (as in free beer) M$ Services for Unix™)?:
>
>    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/
>
> as per some recent postings of mine, the company
> I work for is investigating possible alternatives
> to Cygwin.  SFU seems a possibility.  there are
> many issues here, but two which are bothering me
> considerably at the moment are:
>
>  ①  “Passport‟?  I have no idea what this is, but
>     from the reading-up I have been doing on SFU,
>     before downloading it you must have one of
>     these (which is supposedly free).  I myself
>     have *no* interest in _anything_ M$ insists I
>     have, so am extraordinarily reluctant to even
>     download SFU.
>      ⇒ What the fsck is it?
>  
>
Passport is Microsoft's all-pervasive digital identity thingy.. Hotmail, MSN
messenger, and I'm sure lots of other MS services use it. You sign in 
with your
email address, etc.

>      ⇒ How can it be neutralized?
>     (I have not yet done any research on what I see
>     as a side-issue, which is also perhaps a private
>     hang-up of mine.)
>  
>
I know nothing about that..

>  ②  Re-distribution?  SFU seems to obey the shrink
>     wrap maxim that you cannot read the license
>     until after you have opened it up and by so
>     doing (at least in the eyes of some), agreed
>     to its terms.  Upshot is I haven't been able
>     to definitively read M$ terms and conditions,
>     but I did find a rather depressing posting of
>     what is claimed to be the SFU 3.5 EULA, which
>     suggests re-distribution is not allowed.  But
>     we would strongly like to include whatever it
>     is we decide on (SFU or Cygwin or whatever)
>     with our product, and so want re-distribution
>     rights.
>      ⇒ Does anyone have the faintest idea what the
>        story is here?
>
>  
>
If it's anything like other MS products, you'll probably have to get a 
license
to redistribute it. Or require your clients to install it themselves.

> there are, of course, numerous follow-ons, like “do
> we want to ‘tie‛ ourselves to a 90000-zillatonne
> capricious monster?‟ (who may also be a competitor),
> etc etc etc --- the above two questions are not at
> all the only issues! --- but I have drawn a bit of
> a blank on the 2nd and am quite annoyed by the 1st.
>
> if anyone has actually _used_ SFU 3.5, I would be
> interested hearing of your experiences.
>
>  
>
I couldn't use it. It requires installation on an NTFS filesystem, which 
I didn't have.

It's a significantly different product to cygwin (not in what it 
provides, but in how
it does it). It's an actual subsystem (like the POSIX one but better), 
rather than
being a hacked win32 program to run unix on (cygwin).

L.