OpenDS

OpenDS

Developer(s)	Sun Microsystems
Type	Directory service
License	CDDL
Website	https://opends.dev.java.net

OpenDS Software is a free, open source directory service, written in Java, and developed as part of the OpenDS project. OpenDS Software implements a wide range of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and related standards, including full compliance with LDAPv3 but also support for Directory Service Markup Language (DSMLv2). It also offers multi-master replication, access control, and many extensions.

OpenDS software is released under Sun Microsystems's Common Development and Distribution (CDDL) License. LDAP and DSML are platform-independent protocols. The software is developed and runs on any system with Java programming language support, including common Linux and UNIX distributions, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and others. The documentation for OpenDS is presented as a Wiki.

History and roadmap

The work on OpenDS started as an internal Sun project around February 2005. OpenDS was initially developed primarily by Neil A. Wilson. Neil was joined by a small team of engineers from Sun's Directory Server team. The code was open-sourced in June 2006.

Sun increased the number of developers working on OpenDS technology after open-sourcing the code. Developers outside Sun also joined the new open-source project. Community members like Boni.org, Penrose, and JBoss began to use OpenDS in their projects. In early 2008 the OpenDS project had over 20 regular contributors.

OpenDS software is built daily. Each build goes through automated unit-testing. Quality engineers monitor the source code, regularly picking up builds to run additional tests, in order to promote the build. Promoted builds on which additional stress and system-test campaigns are run can become milestones. Milestones that undergo further, more exhaustive testing can become major version releases.

Release history

OpenDS Recent Release History

Date	Release
December 15, 2009	2.2.0
July 17, 2009	2.0.0
July 3, 2009	2.0.0 RC4
June 23, 2009	2.0.0 RC3
June 10, 2009	2.0.0 RC2
May 25, 2009	2.0.0 RC1

Public Forum

Discussions about the OpenDS project are done through public mailing lists mentioned on the OpenDS project web site. Users and developers can be reached on the #opends irc channel on freenode.net. Every first Tuesday of the month, 9am PST, 6pm CET the OpenDS community holds a public conference call meeting to share in voice project news and discuss technical topics.

Governance

In April 2007, the project owners modified the project governance. The text “This Project Lead, who is appointed by Sun Microsystems, is responsible for managing the entire project” was replaced by “This Project Lead, who is appointed and removed by a majority vote of the Project Owners, is responsible for managing the entire project".

In September 2007, the project owners were laid off from Sun Microsystems.

Late in 2007, questions arose as to whether the project was governed as an open source project. One of the project owners complained publicly ^[1] that Sun Microsystems had required project owners to accept governance changes to the project in order to keep their benefits. The team resigned from their project owner role. Simon Phipps, Chief Open source Officer of Sun Microsystems, claimed that Sun was only reverting governance changes that had never been approved. John Waters also published an article ^[2] on the topic.

In 2011, a few months after the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle released Oracle Unified Directory, based on OpenDS.

See also

	Free software portal
	Java portal

• GlassFish
• List of LDAP software
• Oracle Unified Directory
• OpenSSO
• OpenPTK
• OpenDJ

External links

• OpenDS website
• OpenDS documentation Wiki

References

1. ^ Letter by Neil Wilson
2. ^ Article by John Waters