title: Red Hat buying Netscape Directory, Certificate Servers link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2004/10/02/red-hat-buying-netscape-directory-certificate-servers/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 760 created: 2004/10/02 00:21:00 created_gmt: 2004/10/02 00:21:00 comment_status: open post_name: red-hat-buying-netscape-directory-certificate-servers status: publish post_type: post

Red Hat buying Netscape Directory, Certificate Servers

It’s official. Red Hat has posted a press release announcing a deal to acquire Netscape’s Directory and Certificate servers from AOL/Netscape.

This is real good news for those of us in the LDAP business. The Slashdot post on this from 9/30/04 had over 200 replies, which just goes to show there is indeed intelligent life in the universe.

As a fairly satisfied user of Sun’s rebranded version of the Netscape Directory server (which they acquired after the dissolution of the iPlanet partnership), I’ve kept a careful eye on the Netscape version (which has sometimes been hard to find, buried somewhere among a pile of broken links to technologies Netscape no longer supports). It’s been pretty clear for a long time that AOL wasn’t even trying to market these Netscape properties, and at least from a “maintaining balance in the universe” standpoint its good to see they will be going to a home where they won’t be wasted.

The other good part is that these products will soon be open sourced, and made available for deployment on advanced Linux systems like the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise 4. AOL/Netscape did not support Linux on its latest versions, and Sun has only paid lipservice to the open source O/S (They claim their latest version, rebranded “Java System Enterprise Directory”, works on the now antiquated Red Hat Enterprise 2.1. Right.). At work this has been an issue because we’re now engineering a probable move of most of our web tier to Linux on Intel. Up until now it looked like the directories would have to stay on Solaris/Sparc.

I’ll take a careful look at Red Hat’s next release of the Netscape Directory, especially because the schemae and access controls in the Sun and Netscape products are almost identical and as a result the transition in our enterprise would be fairly painless. Interesting contrast here. Some companies, like Oracle, AOL and Novell (remmember WordPerfect? Or UNIXWare? DRDOS?), gobble up others and run them into the ground (beware, PeopleSoft and SuSE customers), others, like Red Hat, give them new life (think Cygwin here).

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo