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.