“This month, we begin with a review of the directory server
software released by those providers most closely linked with Sun
hardware — Innosoft, MessagingDirect, the Sun-Netscape Alliance,
and the OpenLDAP Project…”
“For email transfer and HTTP service, open source products
sendmail and Apache have emerged as sustainable market leaders. In
this regard, LDAP’s market is more like the relational database
market, where commercial vendors such as Oracle and IBM dominate.
However, the OpenLDAP Project seems to be gaining fast.”
“Kurt Zeilenga, owner of the Net Boolean Inc. consultancy,
launched the OpenLDAP Project just last summer, with version 1.0
released in August 1998. While that LDAP server was useful for
special applications, it was also fragile, poorly documented, and
generally demanded arcane wizardry for installation and operation.
Improvements over the last year inspired Zeilenga to say, “I am
amazed every day at how hard our volunteers work … OpenLDAP 1.2
is a robust and stable LDAPv2 implementation. OpenLDAP 2.0, the
project’s LDAPv3 implementation, is currently available for ‘alpha’
testing.”