Samba 4: An Active Directory Replacement
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Samba 4 which is still in development is the file sharing/logon service program used in Linux that looks to replace Microsoft AD (Active Directory) completely. Although some of the features of AD are available in Samba 3 it takes a lot of work to get these working. At work we’ve recently switched our servers over to Linux and use Samba as a simple logon/file server. It took nearly a month of work to get everything right. The biggest feature missing from Samba 3 is group policies, to work around this we have very long logon scripts. With Samba 4 group policy will be implemented that will make everyone who uses Samba with Windows clients lives easier. No release date has been set but the developers are contemplating releasing a version for those who just want to use Samba as an AD replacement.
Source: Computerworld
The Linux Foundation has calculated the total cost of developing a Linux Distro. They used Fedora 9 as their basis. The total cost estimated to be 10.8 billion dollars. With 1.4 of that developing the kernel alone. They came to this figure through calculating based on the number of lines of code and the average salary of a software developer. It has estimated that to develop from scratch it would take 24 years. There are more interesting stats in the 
