Likewise Blog

I’m often asked why Likewise invests in Likewise Open. Clearly the target market for Likewise is the enterprise market, yet we work hard to provide a set of core functionality under GPL/LGPL that allows any individual or organization to join machines to an Active Directory network for free. Moreover, that code would allow anyone to modify, extend, and ship the same functionality in a community project or commercial offering. How does that benefit Likewise?

The benefits of having an open source offering are not always immediately obvious. However, we’re in it for the long haul and see that the long-term benefits of being open source are good for Likewise, our customers, and the open source community at large.

Helping the Open Source Community

Some of the benefit that we provide to the community could also be derived from offering a proprietary but free-as-in-beer offering. But there are a few things that wouldn’t be possible if we only provided binaries.

First of all, providing source under an open license means that we can ship with Linux distributions like Ubuntu as part of the main distribution or in the regular open source repositories. This is a huge deciding factor for us, because we want to allow any and all Linux users to be able to interoperate with an Active Directory network regardless of whether their company is a Likewise customer. Many of our community members would be faced with using Windows laptops or workstations if they weren’t able to authenticate against AD, regardless of their personal preference. That’s not desirable at all.

We want to make sure that Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X are first-class citizens in any network, and the reality is that many organizations depend on Microsoft Active Directory for authentication and user management.

We also want to enable the community to package and ship Likewise Open with any Linux distribution. We obviously can’t package Likewise Open for every distribution ourselves. But any distribution that wants to offer an RPM, Debian Package, etc, can do so without needing to ask permission from Likewise.

Another consideration is that an open source stack allows users and distributions to compile Likewise Open for other platforms if they choose. Most Linux users are running on x86 or x86_64 systems, but we’d be pleased to see Likewise Open running on PowerPC, ARM, you name it. These platforms may not be strategic to Likewise, but they’re important to many users. Being open means that the community can take Likewise Open to platforms we aren’t shipping on yet, and gives the community the ability to modify Likewise in ways we might not.

Benefits to the Customer

That’s all great, but how does that benefit Likewise’s customer base? For one thing, we learn a lot from our community about the core product in the form of bug reports, questions in the Likewise forums, and interacting with the larger community.

It also helps Likewise work with distribution vendors. Our partnerships with companies like Canonical and Novell are strengthened by the fact that they’re able to recommend Likewise Open to their communities, while offering Likewise Enterprise to their enterprise customers. Again, it’s very important that every user is able to join to their organization’s network, including users running community Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and others.

And, of course, Likewise Open makes Active Directory authentication available to everyone. Whether it’s an Ubuntu-using developer in a mostly Microsoft shop, to a 50-seat art department using Apple machines inside a major corporation with a wholly heterogeneous network.

We also feel indebted to the open source community. The solutions that Likewise provides are largely in response to opportunities made possible by the Linux and open source community. We’re committed to sustaining that community and ensuring that every user that needs to operate in a heterogeneous network has the opportunity to do so. That’s why we’re open, and not just free.

Jay Lyman has hit the nail on the head on the 451 CAOS blog regarding the open core debate. The primary reason vendors are exploring open core as a model is because customers have asked for it.

With Likewise Open we provide the features needed by our entire community, from individual users to enterprise customers with thousands of seats. The primary functionality, connecting to and authenticating against Microsoft’s Active Directory, is fully open source and benefits everybody. We’re pleased to be able to offer Likewise Open under the LGPL/GPL, and to know that this is working for more than 50,000 customers around the world.

Our enterprise customers have the added value of Likewise Enterprise, which adds a number of features to Likewise Open, such as directory migration, reporting and auditing tools, and single sign-on for enterprise applications. The added functionality in Enterprise benefits a very specific segment of our community, and we work closely with our enterprise customers to ensure we provide value here. At the same time, we work hard at making Likewise Open a solution that is robust and updated simultaneously (if not ahead of) Likewise Enterprise.

Simon Phipps and other open source advocates are right to watch for companies that would use the term “open source” abusively or deceptively. But this does not include all open core strategies. Phipps does many of the vendors (and their customers) offering open core solutions an extreme disservice by painting open core as some kind of nefarious lock in scheme. The converse is true: Many open core vendors are providing functionality that benefits an enormous user base whether they do business with the vendor or not.

Open core, when done right, provides value to the open source community and consumers of the proprietary software simultaneously. It may not be the ultimate ideal for those like Phipps who spend their time criticizing open source businesses that don’t achieve their desired level of software licensing purity, but it’s a workable solution that addresses the needs of the customer, community, and vendor.

Today’s a big day for us here at Likewise — we got Likewise Open 6.0 out the door.

One of the struggles that all software development teams face is accurate and relevant testing of an upcoming release.  You could ask one hundred engineers if they believed that their software would experience some currently unimagined environment or use once in production and I believe that all one hundred would answer a resounding “Yes!” How can we “out-imagine” what productions networks throw at us?  Two words – Collective Experience.

Over the past two years, Likewise has been partnering with software and hardware companies to embed seamless Active Directory domain member integration into products.  Most  of our technology licensing and open source customers are familiar with the patch burden that comes from maintaining local changes to an upstream software project and have decided to re-submit changes back to Likewise for inclusion in future releases.  This expanding community of Likewise vendors benefits from the collective experiences of each shared through source code.

We strive to make Likewise a platform for application development.  Our engineering team has frequently discussed hosting a “Likewise Developer’s Summit” to bring engineers outside of Likewise together to discuss what they like, don’t like, and would like to improve in our platform.  I believe that by bringing good engineers together, we can create great software, and by bringing great engineers together we can revolutionize the Unix, Linux, and OS X software industry.

And that’s what I love about a technical community — it can leverage the collective experience of some of the smartest engineers on the planet to improve the contribution of everyone.

Likewise Open 6.0 is out the door, check it out here.  Join our community in the Likewise forums, mailing lists, or maybe even at a future LDS.

There are several reasons why Likewise Open dominates our category (and for the record, with something like 60 times the adoption of our nearest competitor).  Two primary reasons have been the technical strength of the product and its availability under a free open source license.  Years after we released Likewise Open, an astounding 50,000 organizations are using it and Likewise Enterprise to authenticate, secure, and manage Linux, Unix, and Mac – providing a single identity store with single sign-on across multiple platforms and leveraging organizations’ existing infrastructure and investment in Active Directory (and share files across those systems).

Open source isn’t just about free software. When done correctly it’s about building a company with a very different model–a model that allows us to invest more heavily in software engineers than our competitors.  For our premium product, we can charge less for a better product because of our development model.  While we’ve been driving continued year-over-year revenue growth, our computers have had the wobbles.  We’ve seen the following from our competitors:

• Repeated and ongoing layoffs of developers and sales personnel
• Investment then pullback from overseas markets
• Off-shoring of core development to China.
• Using marketing bluster to distract from technical shortcomings

We’ve continued to grow our primary US-based development team as well as our European development team.

Likewise Open is more than just free; it has an active community helping us build, test and improve the project — not just making it a great platform, but significantly reducing the costs of development, accelerating our time to market, while providing a quality product.  Companies like VMWare, Citrix, EMC, Novell, Canonical–not to mention hundreds of integrators that are part of the Likewise Open community.

Likewise Open has also proven to be an incredible on-ramp for those wanting to move to Likewise Enterprise.  And that doesn’t even take into account what we are doing with Likewise-CIFS – which enables file sharing across those networks.

More to come on Likewise Open.

Next week is Red Hat Summit and we’ll be flying our colors in booth 7.   In fact, this is our fourth year attending the event, and every year we’ve seen an increase in activity not just at the event but in the amount of Red Hat customers we are working with for Active Directory integration.  Yep, we’re big fans of Red Hat — especially considering  just how many of our customers use Red Hat as their primary server or desktop platform. And, we’re a previous winner of the Red Hat Innovation Award in the category of Enhanced Security.

As Barry Crist has noted, Red Hat is doing some exciting work in the Cloud, and we see them being successful there.  Our developers work hard to make sure our software, both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise, works well with Red Hat’s.

These are some exciting times for both Red Hat and Likewise, as both companies redefine the future of interoperability in the datacenter.  We’re doing this with commitment to community and open source,  focused and driven engineering and development teams, and creative thinking by our executives and project managers that dares to push the envelope.

Here’s what Tracy Lothringer, Director of Strategic Alliances has to say about Red Hat:

“More than half of Likewise customer server licenses are on Red Hat — so our relationship with them is a critical one. Red Hat is moving well beyond data center oriented Unix migration and is reaching into the broader market. We’re seeing RHEL adoption in market segments that hadn’t been using Unix previously — representing new growth for Linux.  These customers require solutions to unify their increasingly mixed environments.”

We’re really looking forward to this show.  If you’re going, please let us know in the comments, email us at info@likewise.com, or come see us in booth number 7!  We’re a ‘Silver Sponsor’ at this years’ show with a pretty good-sized booth, so we should be easy to find!  Stop on by and say hello, see a demo of Likewise in action, and enter to win an iPad.

Event Details:
Red Hat Summit – Likewise in Booth 7
June 22-25th, 2010
Seaport Hotel and Seaport World Trade Center
One Seaport Lane
Boston, MA 02210
www.redhat.com/summit

One more thing to mention–on June 29th (Tuesday of the week after next) we’re hosting a joint webinar with Red Hat titled  “Securing RHEL Servers with Likewise and Active Directory.”  The webinar is free and we’re encouraging show attendees to invite others in their organization to the webinar as well as anyone else who would like to join.  Register here

See you in Boston!

Great news!! The VAR Guy has named Likewise to his Open Source 50 report ranking us in the top 25.

The Open Source 50 is the VAR Guy’s annual look at open source in the IT channel. The annual survey tracks open source companies based on a range of variables, including the size, influence and growth of their partner programs. Also, The VAR Guy measures the percent of company revenues derived from channel partners.

Being recognized by the VAR Guy is a big deal for Likewise. We take the channel very seriously because of the value they deliver to end users. Many resellers, for instance, are currently selling into accounts that run Active Directory (this is by far the dominant directory out there — with stats as high as 90% penetration). They would like to be able to sell other platforms (Mac/Linux) because of the flexibility and cost savings but don’t have a way for customers to control and administer them. We solve that issue. Using the Likewise platform enables customers to use the operating system they want and need — and many can use our free platform, Likewise Open.

For system integrators, the Likewise platform sits at the heart of a company’s security and authentication center. Integrators love our solution not just as a way to generate revenue from services but also as a straight way to solve a pain point for their customer, again moving from vendor to trusted solution provider and separating themselves from their competitors.

The other great part of Likewise being included in this report — it recognizes the value of our open source roots. None of our commercial AD Bridge competitors have this incredible development and business model. Likewise Open provides thousands of users a fast, easy and free way to authenticate — and gives enterprise IT managers an easy path to the more robust and feature-rich Likewise Enterprise.

What great news for Likewise and our customers.

Back in January, our CEO and chief blogger, Barry Crist, did a couple posts, which are worth taking a look at:

The Channel

Integrator: Wise Up with Likewise

Feel free to post your comment here or write to us at partners@likewise.com if you would like more information about working with Likewise.

Professionally speaking, the past sixteen months have been, for me, some of the most exciting at Likewise that I can remember.  Today was the culmination of the combined effort of our entire engineering team as we announced that Likewise-CIFS is the integrated SMB/CIFS solution for Windows client support on some Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks products.

What makes this announcement special to me personally is not the fact that a major vendor has chosen Likewise; we’ve already established ourselves in the AD authentication bridge space with companies such as Isilon, DataDomain/EMC, VMware, and Citrix.   What makes the HP announcement particularly meaningful to me is my personal involvement in the HP partnership.  Over the past several months I’ve gone through all the daily status meetings, bug triages, late night debugging sessions, and the general things that go with enterprise scale software development.  Having worked at HP prior to coming to Likewise in 2005, I’m glad to see company endeavors succeed, particularly now that I have new friends amongst HP engineers.

Milestones like this announcement are good times to review where we’ve been and where we plan to move towards in the future.  In January 2009, Likewise began an initiative that would become Likewise-CIFS, the SMB/CIFS file server component of the Likewise Open project.  Even though I’ve worked on another SMB server in the past, Likewise-CIFS was really a brand new start.  The server’s multi-threaded architecture and modular components allowed us to parallelize much of the initial work, which was extremely important because the entire file server was being written from scratch.

To fully appreciate the difference between where we started in January 2009 and where we are now in April 2010, it’s best to examine the heart of Likewise Open–the code itself.  A quick glance at the repository from git://git.likewiseopen.org/likewise-open shows around 6800 commits.   That means that over the 337 working days (discounting weekends but including holidays) in the last 16 months the project has averaged about 20 commits per day.   Of course commits in and of themselves do not necessarily equate with improvement.  How many of the 6.8K commits added new code and new value?   Looking strictly at new components, we can conservatively say that a minimum of over 360,000 lines of new, handwritten C code has been added.  That doesn’t even include the 130,000 lines of C# code included in the Likewise Management Console that was made available under the LGPL last year.

If you aren’t a programmer, these numbers probably contain little meaning.  In that case, let’s talk about features.  In the past year, the following is a list of some of the new things that have been added to Likewise-CIFS:

• A complete SMBv1 implementation compatible with Microsoft Windows 2000 and later clients as well as Apple’s OS X 10.5+ and Linux desktops
• SMBv2.0 when serving Windows Vista/7/2008 clients
• Zero Copy support in the SMB server for faster reads and writes
• Scalability up to 50,000 connections on modest commodity hardware
• A GSSAPI NTLM mechanism for application developers desiring to integrate in Windows authentication frameworks
• A user space file system driver implementing Windows compatible byte range locks, opportunistic locks, share modes, security descriptors, and change notification.
• Server-side support for named pipes (necessary for integration with Windows RPC services)
• Privileged user management via the Likewise Security Authority’s (lsassd) local provider
• Managing all Likewise services from a central service control interface
• Central configuration management using the Likewise Registry

All this describes the road we have traveled thus far.  What about our future plans?  Will the next twelve months be as exciting as the past sixteen?  I believe so and here’s why.  There’s several what I call “point” features still remaining for the file server.  Things like Distributed File System (DFS) support and consolidation roots, Access Based Enumeration (ABE), Shadow Copies, and Alternative Data Streams (ADS) are isolated, individual features with a high degree of end user visibility.

But these are really just enhancements.  What broad initiatives do we have in play for the coming year that would match the scale of writing a new SMB file server from scratch?  We have several ideas already in discussion which I hope to be able to share in the coming months.  But sufficient to say that our path forward is to continue to build upon the Likewise Open platform base that we’ve put into play.  The way forward is up–to build upon the foundation already laid.

Likewise Open & Likewise Enterprise can now use the Kerberos 5 credentials you receive when you login to your Windows desktop. These credentials streamline your work flow by allowing you to access network shares and printers across your environment without prompting you for your username and password. This is often referred to as “seamless single-sign on”.

Previously at Likewise we have linked to a third-party compiled PuTTY–a SSH client for Windows–as a way to use your Kerberos 5 credentials. Unfortunately, this version was old and had incomplete support for the Kerberos 5 standard.

We now have our own version of PuTTY that includes complete Kerberos 5 (GSSAPI) support allowing seamless single sign-on to Linux and Unix machines. You can now access your Linux and Unix resources via SSH just as easily as accessing a Windows file server or printer in your enterprise. We have tested this version of PuTTY against our supported platforms and can validate that it works seamlessly with both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise 5.3.

Download the Likewise version of PuTTY to start accessing your Linux and Unix servers via SSH using SSO today.

Great news from the Likewise development pipeline in conjunction with one of our great partners:  Likewise Open 5.4 bits are in the newest Ubuntu 10.4 Alpha release.  Likewise Open has been included in Ubuntu since the Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS) release in April of ‘08.

This marks the first time that Likewise 5.4 bits will be included with the Ubuntu release.  The 5.4 build is currently not considered a stable release, and so is not recommended for production use at this point.  For the latest stable Likewise Open bits, please go here.

Here’s what the Ubuntu community page has to say:

Major new version of likewise-open
The likewise-open package, which provides Active Directory authentication and server support for Linux, has been updated to version 5.4. The package supports upgrades from both the officially supported versions 4.0 (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) and 4.1 (Ubuntu 9.10), as well as the likewise-open5 packages from universe. Since this upgrade involves a lot of configuration file changes and in-place database upgrades, testing and feedback is appreciated.

Some thoughts from Likewise senior developer Jerry Carter:

“We are all very excited about the inclusion of the Likewise Open 5.4 features in the Ubuntu 10.04 release.  The success of Likewise Open 4.x and 5.0 in past Ubuntu releases has been very encouraging.  With 5.4 we are including a new service manager interface for managing the set of likewise daemons, a new centralized configuration store which helps make future upgrades much simpler, and a rewritten client and server network I/O stack.  And as always, the Ubuntu server and desktop teams have been very helpful when navigating the packaging specific issues that cropped up.”

Finally, here are some thoughts from Gerry Carr, head of Platform Marketing at Canonical:

“Likewise Open allows organizations to manage mixed environments of Windows, Apple and Ubuntu users – enabling increased adoption of Ubuntu into the enterprise. Previous versions have proven to be very popular with the Ubuntu Server user base and we are delighted to be able to bring 5.4 to current 10.04 Alpha.”

You can get the latest Ubuntu Alpha 2 release bits here: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/alpha2

Here’s some more color on our work with integrators.  While we work with IBM Global Services, Accenture, and Avanade on many of our largest projects involving Likewise Enterprise, we also have seen robust growth in our work with regional integrators, many of whom have deep expertise in open source as part of their practices.

Here’s a great Likewise write up from TooMuchGreen, a Leeds, UK based integrator focusing on Linux, Lamp, and open source solutions: http://toomuchgreen.eu/2010/01/wise-up-with-likewise/

“Likewise [Open] is a superb, quick and easy utility for both Linux and Mac which allows authentication (single sign on) to a Microsoft Active Directory network…”

One of our other integrators once wrote me an e-mail with the following equation:

Linux + LAMP + Likewise = goodness.

Amen.  The reason for this “goodness” is that we have offerings for system integrators that span from projects large and small.  Likewise Open is the best way  to authenticate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems into Active Directory for any size of project.  And it is free of licensing costs.  For complex projects that require group policy, audit, reporting, and event management we have a simple upgrade to Likewise Enterprise.