Tony Earnshaw wrote:
Hallvard B Furuseth wrote, on 26. feb 2007 20:19:
[...]
Is there something particular which makes this more so for OpenLDAP than
other packages, or are OpenLDAP releases more buggy than other packages,
or are existing bugs more likely to be fatal, or...?
I had the impression that this was mostly a RedHat issue. But if it's
more general, it sounds like the only likely fix would be in OpenLDAP
or the release methods or something.
I guess I was born cynical; Red Hat always (through many years) had a
lousy record of supporting OpenLDAP, whilst its support of stuff like
Apache and MySQL has always been impeccable. Not only these packages,
but the OS as a whole has been supported and maintained (with or
without back porting) in a manner that I as a SysV and Red Hat
aficionado would find it difficult (but not impossible) to leave for
any competitor. One asks oneself what, for example, Centos will do in
the circumstances.
Lately Red Hat has adopted (bought) it's own directory services from
Netscape/Sun. Looking at Red Hat's service support conditions
(available for anyone on the net), I see that Red Hat (nothing like
repeating the name for cognizance) wishes to charge around $17,000 per
site for support of its own directory services.
Or you can use Fedora Directory Server for free. Also note that the
price is _per server_, not per entry or per user like many of the other
large commercial LDAP server vendors. So if you have a large number of
entries, it can be a good deal.
I don't see any motive for continued Red Hat OpenLDAP support there.
Red Hat has a large number of customers running the OpenLDAP server
provided as part of the base OS, and these customers are supported, and
will be for the lifetime of their support contracts with Red Hat. I
won't get into the entire history, but there have been many customers
who adamantly refused to upgrade OpenLDAP because it was "just working"
(for some value of "working") and did not want to "fix something that
wasn't broken". Of course this is a gross oversimplification but should
convey the general idea. And yes, I've heard a thousand times that
"yes, it is broken, they just don't know it - yet" (and so have the
aforementioned Red Hat customers, to no avail).
Red Hat's pecuniary philosophy is fast becoming a superset of
Microsoft's.
Hardly. But you're welcome to your own opinion. Red Hat spent a
considerable amount of money to purchase the Netscape server products,
open source them, and make them available _for free_ as Fedora Directory
Server. A lot of the work to open source the code, replace proprietary
components with open source alternatives, make the build process more
friendly to the open source community, package-ify, etc. was done solely
for the purpose of creating a viable open source project, and at the
expense of adding other features to the product to attract more paying
customers.
Does Microsoft's "pecuniary philosophy" include purchasing large, well
established proprietary products, open sourcing them, and making them
available for free?
Is Red Hat entitled to a fair return on its investment?
My own experience over the last three years has been, that (latterly
with Buchan Milne's continually updated Red Hat specs/srpms), I can
probably do a far better job of supporting directory services using
OpenLDAP on Red Hat and Fedora bases than Red Hat can using its own
stuff; certainly for far less money. OpenLDAP is a crucial component
of all Red Hat sites I have anything to do with.
That's great. If it works for you, more power to you.
--Tonni
