January 10, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to reports released Monday, Linux vendor Red Hat (redhat.com) is planning to release Netscape’s Directory Server to the open source community, which may improve scalability to current open source lightweight directory access protocol offerings, according to a developer for the Linux distributor.
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The switch to open source the information directory product comes after Red Hat’s September 2004 acquisition of certain Netscape Enterprise assets from AOL. Netscape Directory Server is an LDAP server that provides a network centralized registry for application and user settings, as well as policies and access control information. Many Linux distributions, including Red Hat, already include the OpenLDAP open source project.
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In a recent blog posting, Red Hat developer Christopher Blizzard said developers devoted to open source software have been missing a “decent” directory server, noting that the OpenLDAP product, while valuable, lacks certain basic elements included in most of the proprietary directory servers.
