Symas Blog

Usually I don’t blog much about new developments in the OpenLDAP code; I figure people who are interested will just subscribe to the commit mailing list and/or the devel list and stay informed. But sometimes there’s a greater significance to certain commits that isn’t immediately obvious. For example, back in August 2008 I committed code to allow our LDAP library to work with the Mozilla NSS security library. With support already in place for OpenSSL and GnuTLS, it’s not obvious that we really needed to add Yet Another Security Library to our list. But that was a small piece of the work needed to replace Mozilla LDAP with OpenLDAP in Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey, which will lead to Bigger and Better Things. Last week we committed several additions to this code, contributed by developers at Red Hat. Folks who have been paying attention to the blogs here at Symas should immediately recognize that something’s up.

We’ve given Red Hat a lot of flack over time, for a variety of reasons. And we’ve taken some flack for doing so, as well. But it basically boiled down to a few points:

1. They weren’t contributing back to our community.
2. They were giving us a bad name by shipping old OpenLDAP versions that were several years out of date.
3. They were making false claims about the superiority of their recently acquired LDAP technology.

Times change. We’re actually getting useful bug reports from Red Hat now; they’ve updated their releases to something less than a year old, and we’re collaborating on code. Of course, despite belief to the contrary, we’ve always tried to be helpful in technical discussions with the FedoraDS (pardon me, 389DS now) team. It’s the nature of open source after all, to share your accumulated experience with others. But now we’re sharing that experience in a much more direct, concrete fashion, as Red Hat is preparing to use OpenLDAP’s libraries instead of the old Mozilla LDAP code. Nice work guys, and welcome to the OpenLDAP community!