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.