The technology, which was formerly Netscape Directory Server, is now available under the open source General Public License, and has also been released to the Fedora open source community, which will manage its development.
While Fedora Directory Server is freely available from the Fedora project, which was set up in 2003 to handle the community development of Fedora Linux, Red Hat does not provide support for the technology.
As Fedora Linux developments eventually find their way into the officially supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so will Fedora Directory Server shape the future of the Red Hat Directory Server product, which is available using the same annual subscription model as Enterprise Linux.
The Red Hat Directory Server product will be available in mid-June for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, and will later be made available for Sun Microsystems’ Solaris, as well as Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX 11i for HP’s Integrity and HP 9000 servers.
As well as Directory Server, the purchase of the Netscape technologies from AOL also gave Red Hat the Netscape Certificate Management System and the Netscape Enterprise Server. The company said it will reveal details in the coming months about its plans to open source additional technologies that were part of the purchase.
