hyc's Journal: RedHat and Netscape Directory Server - yawn

Saw this article on InternetNews talking about things we've all already heard. This particular passage got my attention:

"One of the things that we, as software developers who care about whether or not we're using open source software, have been missing is a decent directory server," Red Hat developer Christopher Blizzard wrote in a recent blog posting. "No offense meant to the openldap folks, but it's well known that openldap doesn't scale as well as it needs to and is missing some very basic functionality that competing proprietary directory servers include today."

It's well known that *the version of OpenLDAP bundled by RedHat* (2.0.27) is 2+ years out of date, version 2.1 is over 200x faster than 2.0. The current 2.2 release is faster than the current Netscape version by a fair margin, and the margin *increases* as the number of clients increases. I.e., OpenLDAP 2.2 scales better than Netscape or anything else out there. (see benchmarks for some illustrative test results.)

Too bad Red Hat wasted all that money buying an obsolete code base. If they were really sincere about open source, they should have thrown some resources into OpenLDAP development, they would have gotten a greater return on investment in a shorter amount of time.