Of course you don't. You don't "need" it in Windows, either. But having it is a lot more convenient for people like the submitter than not having it, and if Linux wants to get more copies in the enterprise, they should figure out some standardized way of emulating it.
What I was getting at is that all the tools are already there. For people who need "point and click and shiny", yes I would agree, but there's so much more flexibility and control with the tools that do exist in *nix, that at least IMO emulating windows technology is just going to be too restrictive. Once one is willing to explore just a little bit, the power in unix is quite breathtaking, esp when compared to what you get with windows. Yeah, there's a learning curve, but it's not too bad.
From a practical perspective, a spreadsheet is a database. Just not a relational one.
okay, technically speaking, that's true. let me put it another way. Like windows, spreadsheets have a shallow learning curve, but do not scale very well. To do anything serious, you will quickly abandon the former for the latter.
If you don't even KNOW what group policy is, why are you posting here? Get a knowledge injection of how NT and AD works, then come back.
No, not everything group policy does can be done in Linux.
In *nix, you don't *need* Group Policy. And there's no smells-of-ass, cluster-fuck registry "technology" to deal with. AD started out life as a stunted, dumbed down LDAP server. A poor copy of Novell's NDS. Granted it's gotten better, but it's still more restrictive than it needs to be. Applying windows technology in this case is like calling a spreadsheet a database.
NAT also cuts their traffic costs because it keeps customers from running servers.
Aside from TOS issues, running servers (at least web servers) is no big deal. I've run a web server for years on dynamic IP addresses, thanks to dyndns.org.
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson