Jeremy Allison Has Resigned from Novell to Protest MS Patent Deal (Groklaw)

Posted Dec 23, 2006 12:06 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Active Directory and eDirectory system uses LDAP for holding information, but it goes far beyond that.

You have easy integration into AD built into every windows desktops. You can perform all sorts of authentication on many different services and have fairly decent ways to visualize information and allow more normal people to add users and set permissions on network file systems etc etc.

It's kinda like the difference between having a file system for a operating system versus a operating system.

Right now it's possible to have something that does most of the important functionality of AD/eDirectory using Kerberos + LDAP + dozens of other packages, but there isn't anybody out there offering a coesive FOSS solution for it and it's very difficult to setup and very difficult to administrate.

Nothing like Small business server were you can have one somewhat-experianced setup a small business with a Active Directory system were more normal staff are able to add and remove users and such.

This isn't nessicarially a bad thing. I feel personally that Single Sign On is overrated and is a HUGE security risk. It's much safer to have individual servers with individual passwords for everything. There isn't much of a real technical reason for SSO/AD/eDirectory for a small business...

But nowadays Active Directory is the _minimal_ requirement for most of the things you'd use Windows servers with Windows desktop for in most any sized business. It's what people want and what they expect.