Red Hat releases Netscape Directory Server to OSS

parry writes "Red Hat has released the Netscape Directory server acquired from Netscape Security Solutions under a "GPL + Exception" license. The Fedora Directory Server is made up of a number of different pieces of software, each with their own licensing. "

Comments

A little help

[manno]

So what exactly does this do? And what closed source products does this replace?

Re:A little help

[diegocgteleline.es]

Microsoft's Active Directory and propietary directory servers for $BIG UNIXES. Red Hat plays in the "Big server" market so this is a mejor milestone for them - and for linux in the enterprise. Lots of netscape directory's customers will want to switch to redhat too.

Calling licensing brainiacs

[flacco]

anyone care to examine the license - "GPL with Exception" - and give us an Evil / Not Evil summary?

Re:Calling licensing brainiacs

[palfrey]

IANAL, and also not any sort of licensing expert, but the really iffy bit looks like

Only Red Hat, Inc. may make changes or additions to the list of Approved Interfaces.

This means that only Red Hat, Inc. gets to make changes to the list of Approved Interfaces. Since the file that contains the list of Approved Interfaces is also distributed under the GNU GPL, it's perfectly fine to make changes to that file. We just wanted to make sure that if you do make changes to that file that the additional rights granted through this exception do not apply.

I think there's some unresolved issues there, namely that (for the sake of argument) Red Hat goes out of business, the software becomes significantly restricted as no-one else would be allowed to extend the Approved Interfaces list (without getting permissions from the now disappeared major copyright holder i.e. Red Hat), and so the development of new interfaces for plugins to non-GPL'ed code becomes impossible. Ok, this means we just stick to GPL plugins, but still...

Re:Oh well....

[diegocgteleline.es]

they are stuck and are forced to have their code infected by this heavily viral licence.

Well, redhat is allowing you to use freely and for free a product that costs several millons of dollars. You should THANK them that they give you this possibility, if you don't like it don't use it or just shut up. If you are doing money from the product redhat opensourced but you don't want to give them back anything...well, I wouldn't really like to be your friend ;)

Released; Let the Benchmarks Begin

[LordMyren]

Not a dupe, its actually released now.

It'll be great to see the benchmarks to settle this;
SunONE
IBM's ldap thingy
OpenLDAP
Novell's eDirectory
maybe even AD for kicks.

Also, just a note, redhat's docs are actually pretty good. Even the web pages ~2500 word Architecture docs probably outweight the usefulness of everything else available on the web. One of the most frequenty Directory Service gripes is how bad the docs are; finding out how to build a good DS system is pretty much a black art. Part fo the reason OpenLDAP is so unacceptable as a solution is because you're at the mercy of whatever tools you can find; docs are MIA. RedHat's already done a decent job of making them accessible, which is good because I might need them to make this thing compile on Debian.

Way to go red-hat. Everytime red hat shows up on campus I always spend five-ten minutes asking about the Netscape DS. Thanks for the release; here's to long life.

Myren

Re:OpenLDAP vs this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it does multimaster replication - openldap syncrepl is pretty orthogonal to that, you could syncrepl a local directory on your laptop (and have disconnected read-only operation when you're away from the corporate network) to a multimastered high-availability server farm, if you had a package that had both (i.e. some future parallel-universe merge of the two source trees :-) )

Also, as computer scientists have known for many years, hierarchy where there is no natural hierarchy is evil - netscape allows you to have a pretty flat database underneath and use "Virtual Views" to build up appropriate domain-specific hierarchies for different purposes, and maintain performance. It thus allows for LDAP directories that are less of a mess than is traditional, though I'd really like to see a LRAP (lighweight relational access protocol) that didn't have ODBC's intrinsic SQL-specifity and securability problems.

On the other hand, in my experience, recent openldap has much better schema validation than netscape server had when I last used it (yes, years ago openldap had very weak schema validation, that changed). Also,the use of openldap in linux distros has meant it's really been hammered hard on the security front, and is now rather secure.

Useful for home networks?

[smartin]

I have a small network of Linux and Mac machines and would really like to set up one address book that is accessible to all my machines and all my accounts under both Thunderbird and Mac Mail.

Would this be useful for this application or is it overkill? What are the other alternatives, I played with openldap using something called abook once and it was unusable.