30 November 06 - 23:17Agility and Performance

Recently I'd been benchmarking OpenLDAP again, and measuring how different malloc implementations affect slapd's performance. On November 22nd I received a private email to the effect of "this is all well and good, but what are you going to do about the slow ldapadd performance?" In all this time I'd been focused strictly on search performance, so I stopped what I was doing and took a look at what was going on with ldapadd... (more)

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20 November 06 - 22:25Gee, why would you do this?

Somebody's been wasting time making it easier and faster to install OpenDS?

What's up with that? (more)

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14 November 06 - 22:45Pointless -- NOT!

Pointless Rant? Not when you publish it somewhere where we can see it.

Welcome back to visibility. I love a really good rant that starts out hostile and angry and gets thoughtful and clear by the middle. Thanks for the feedback. We at Symas look for guidance like this. (more)

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13 November 06 - 12:36Open Source Java

Symas Coproration congratulates Sun Microsystems on pulling of a very successful end of life announcement for the proprietary Java family of software products. The graceful turnover to the Open Source community frees the code base to evolve as the users wish with the support of Sun (to whatever extent they decide to continue funding).

We can only hope that Microsoft is as generous with their .NET assets at some point in the future. That would give the various teams the option of normalizing the libraries of these two over the hill competitors. It's likely that Sun will have the limelight for some to come as Microsoft hasn't seen the light yet as far as we can tell. (more)

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13 November 06 - 02:35Seven year loop?

I find this a "groundog day" moment in the spirit of the Bill Murray movie. It keeps happening over and over. Securant Technologies emerges from stealth mode to announce what everyone else has announced at least once, and most, several times. This smells like claims made by IBM (Tivoli), Novell, HP, CA, and who knows who else. In 1999 even Symas was peddling Connexitor Enterprise Management System (EMS) with entitlements. EMS worked. It still works as a museum piece. Nobody wanted to fund it or even try it. We were in such stealth mode that we couldn't figure out how to get out of it.

Emerging from "stealth mode" was a cliche in '99, too. (more)

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08 November 06 - 01:54Web 2.0 ... Enterprise 2.0 ... Hype 2.0 ...

I was really close to moving on past this article when a couple of phrases put my back up. The breathless excitement is a trademark of this VC publicity engine (and honestly so), but it went past that. (more)

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07 November 06 - 23:35Sun and Ubuntu ... Quiet

Unlike the soap opera of Oracle-Red Hat and Microsoft-Novell, Sun and Ubuntu quietly announced that they are working together to get Ubuntu certified on more Sun servers and to get Sun's next release of Java working on Ubuntu. The elephants quietly prepare to dump their expensive proprietary UNIX platforms. Symas and OpenLDAP will continue to supprt the legacy systems as well as Linux during the transition, of course. (more)

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07 November 06 - 10:21Faust

A friend keeps referring to the Novell (SuSE Linux) Microsoft agreement as a replay of Faust. If you believe the Forbes article, it was more like a shotgun marriage than a Faustian deal. In fact, if you buy that story, it looks like Novell was walked off a plank.

We suspect it's more like Brownian Movement (think drunkard's walk). ... long ramble follows ... (more)

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06 November 06 - 08:28Customers, Open Source's only true friends

This should be obvious: Open Source Software's only true friends. It is not strictly true, the developers are actually the only true friends and the only people other than developers who are friends are the customers using it. (more)

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04 November 06 - 22:23Support Vacuum

Nick Kew, a frequent contributor to the Register's Developer site, wrote Apache Packages, creating a support vacuum. It is a very clear and extensive discussion of the problems of supporting a package in the world of the Linux Distribution. It's a problem all Open Source Software projects have to deal with.

It's also the reason why Symas refused to support OpenLDAP for HP unless they adopted our Connexitor™ Directory Services (CDS) distribution of OpenLDAP. It's simply too expensive to maintain all the variations otherwise. (more)

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02 November 06 - 02:50Well, that's two today for Novell!

On a blog (see the link to the news story in the blog entry), an announcement of Novell's eDirectory winning a 28 million entry deal at British Telecom. That's the second one we've noticed today.

This one sounds familiar. It's a space we're familiar with and a group of competitors we've met before. It's interesting that BT's 21st Century Network only has 28 million users .. or that it has 28 million users already. Shows what I know about their move to an IP-based backbone. (more)

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01 November 06 - 22:54Congratulations to Novell!

Novell announced that SAP is using eDirectory to support the more than 500,000 users on the SAP Developer Network. This is clearly a big announcement for eDirectory and Symas congratulates Novell on the win and SAP for adopting directory technology to replace what was undoubtably a collection of non-standard flat files scattered throughout their Web infrastructure. (more)

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