title: Red Hat Directory Coming Soon link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2005/04/03/red-hat-directory-coming-soon/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 751 created: 2005/04/03 18:12:00 created_gmt: 2005/04/03 18:12:00 comment_status: open post_name: red-hat-directory-coming-soon status: publish post_type: post

Red Hat Directory Coming Soon

The press release in which Red Hat announced it’s purchase of the Netscape Security Solutions products, including Directory Server, stated in part that:

“Red Hat plans to start marketing these products as part of its Open Source Architecture over the next 6 to 12 months.”

Then in January InternetNews had an article quoting a Red Hat spokesperson that the company would by releasing the Directory source under the GPL in the next 12 months.

Chris Blizzard of Red Hat wrote about the subject in a January blog entry. After making reaffirming his employer’s commitment to open source and to taking this particular code into the community, he went on to say:

We’ll be open sourcing components as we can. We’ve still got to talk to our customers and figure out what they would like to see. We need to try to talk to the larger community and try to come up with a structure that works to build a large, outward-facing and successful project. And we need to get the source code ready. None of these tasks are small. But we’re working on them. Stay tuned.

Later, in a February entry, he expanded further on what was going on behind the scenes:

For the Directory Server we’ve selected a license for the project and have started working on getting the source together for a release… From the strictly technical standpoint, we’ve got some large hurdles… The build system that it uses right now is pretty far from autoconf… the locations for a lot of the libraries that the Directory Server expects to build against are hard wired into the build system… I’m not sure if we’ll be in a buildable state at the time the source is released, but I’m hoping that we can get there. It’s just a long road.

Red Hat now hosts the documentation for the acquired Netscape products. In talking about the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Server, one of the product team members noted that they were able to successfully install the Directory Server on it (something that can’t be said for Sun’s latest version of the same product). What this all means is that we’ll probably see an early opening up of the source tree for the Directory very soon, with SRPMS and RPMS to follow awhile later.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo