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Red Hat Opens Netscape Directory
suezz writes " Eweek is running a story that Redhat is releasing Netscape Directory (LDAP) under the GPL - this is huge at least from my point of view. I know of at least two huge companies that have standardized on Netscape Directory for their web applications."
Ever used the Active directory on Windows? I mean a properly created one in a larger organization. Had to search for an email address of someone in another branch or division? Ever had to log into another machine on that network? Search for printers on another floor?
Well, you can actually do that and more with any LDAP server.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
$20M is not a lot of money in Silicon Valley, especially for an enterprise product. Probably nothing compared to Netscape/iPlanet's development costs.
Plus, after years of hotair, RedHat just became credible Windows alternative for internal applications. cheep.
In the short term no they wont make this money back right away, but in the long term they'll make it back a thousand fold. Anyone who has ever tried to setup and configure OpenLDAP knows that its not worth it and will send you to a mental hospital fairly quickly. Netscape Directory (or whatever they're calling it now) is not only extremely easy to configure, but it was designed by brilliant engineers. Back a few years ago the engineers were claiming that one typical server running Netscape Directory could handle 200,000 clients. I haven't looked at the code yet, but according to some Red Hat enginneers that I've talked to that have seen it, they confirm that this is probably possible and were generally extrememly impressed with the code quality. Netscape Directory is high quality from its core all the way out to its exterior with easy configuration, how often do you see that in any environment(commercial or open).
I know that a few of the Fedora devs commented on how they also got a whole bunch of additional code that they hadn't even asked for but came along with Netscape Directory that they are still trying to figure out what to do with. In a worst case scenario, they'll just open source it and let the community find uses for it (Red Hat open sources everything they do, they even allow any open source projects free use of any patents they may hold, patents btw are only held as legal defense). This a great advancement for the community and should allow many more businesses to start migrating to linux. Back to my original point though... this will allow many more companies to switch to linux, whether it be Red Hat or some other distro it doesn't matter. Overall it will increase linux's marketshare and as a result make linux more popular leading more businesses to look at it as an alternative. A good percentage of those businesses will probably become Red Hat customers so everyone wins.
Regards,
Steve
Because red hat is not just giving it for free - they've opensourced it. Under the GPL. This means it's really free, we can improve it, port to weird architectures, to freeBSD, etc. We can see the code, not just use it.