Many think "sudo" is 30 years old, but Microsoft holds fast to the plan again.
Microsoft has this week been granted a patent application on a solution that enhances a computer user's rights on the system. The solution, which has a graphical user interface presents the user with a list of accounts that have rights to perform a task the user has requested, but that user does not have rights to perform with the account the user is logged on. 
This sounds like a sensible solution, which makes it easier for computer users to use an account without administrator privileges to normal.
The patent has, however, led many to respond. Functionality that gives users access to higher privileges when needed, has been around for operating systems at least since the early 1970s, the mainframe time. Groklaw refers to documentation on this on this page.
More well known is perhaps "sudo" command, which should have been invented around 1980 and adopted on a BSD-based system. It is probably standard for all Unix and Unix-like systems, including Mac OS X and Linux.
However, sudo is a text command, while Microsoft's solution has a graphical user interface, or "sudo for dummies," which Graklaws writer calls it.
The is a truth with modifications, the Microsoft solution does more than that. It also lists some users who have enough rights to perform the task. In addition, it is unlikely that Microsoft has forgotten that sudo exist, not least because sudo is mentioned in several places in the patent, which will be implemented in Windows Vista and later.
Regardless of the patent has led many to come with criticism of the U.S. patent office and approval of this patent. Computerworld.com has collected a number of comments on this page.
The question is what this will mean for, among other things, Policy Kit, which is used by several Linux distributions and apparently offer the same functionality. It depends partly on whether Microsoft intends to enforce the patent, or that the company only purpose is to block others from getting a patent for a similar solution.
