On the Significance of Changing Release Maintenance Policy

I posted the OpenLDAP Project's updated Release Maintenance Policy the other day (link to come). But it is not obvious why anyone should care. Since:

• Every other viable enterprise Directory Software is either end-of-life or overpriced for ancient proprietary stuff, there's really nowhere for firms to go but OpenLDAP, and
• OpenLDAP Project had a Release Maintenance Policy that implied that people should chase "The Latest Release" there is a tendency to stagnate and fail to keep the software up to date.

The first is just the way it is. You can use:

• AD with its aging warts,
• ForgeRock's version of OpenDJ,
• Red Hat's 389ds (free but denigrated) or "Red Hat Directory Server" (not free and the "Buy It" link is dead,
• Oracle's Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition (ODSEE) which is end of life or their priced Oracle Unified Directory ( rewarmed ODSEE), or
• One of several more niche LDAP products, mostly not FOSS.

Or go to an X.500 package and use their LDAP connector.

So the project decided that the Long Term Release strategy would offer stability to Enterprise Users. A big thing. And with the new packaging, make keeping current on the LTS Release easy by using RPM and DPKG updating ... basically transparent.

That's the big deal.

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Yeah, something of a "commercial announcement" ... consider it a public service announcement ;-)

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postscript: I gave Red Hat a press release quote back in the day that they bought the Netscape iPlanet intellectual property. We WERE excited, hoping they would invest and help move the LDAP space forward ... as they told us was the plan. They did, invest, but not move the LDAP space forward in our opinion. Sad.