Welcome to Likewise Open
by Krishna Ganugapati
This is the inaugural entry in my blog on Likewise Open. I wanted to tell you about how we got here.
Likewise Software was formed with the principle of making Linux and UNIX systems first class citizens in a Windows network. Linux is a powerful and elegant operating system making huge inroads as a server operating system powering web infrastructure. It has however been a challenge to deploy Linux systems in corporate intranets. This has traditionally been the mainstay of Windows powered by Active Directory in the center of the network. For Linux desktops and servers to actively participate in corporate intranets, it is a necessity that they seamlessly integrate into Active Directory.
The most fundamental piece of technology that anchors this integration is the ability to authenticate into Active Directory.
Over the several months, we experienced a quiet but persistent interest from the open source community to make this technology mainstream. And so we came to ask ourselves the question. What if we were to open source the core of the likewise authentication agent infrastructure along with the self-configuration and the familiar graphical interface. This could then be integrated into Linux distributions and provide an out-of-the-box seamless experience for Linux machines to authenticate to Active Directory. This could accelerate the adoption of Linux into the corporate intranet.
We had some obvious concerns.
The first was that the AD integration experience should be of the highest fidelity. That the package could stand scrutiny as being something that, except for the most hard-core do-it-yourself hobbyists, mainstream users and developers of Linux could install a deb or rpm file and then fire up a graphical console, join to an Active Directory domain and function as fully integrated citizens in a Windows network.
To ensure that we would provide this high fidelity experience, we decided to release all of our self configuration and graphical interface code in addition to the core authentication technology. Likewise has an open sourced over 20,000 lines of code that combines all this arcana. One of the early accolades we received was from a group of OSS developers who said that they constantly have to join their Linux machine to Active Directory several times a day and it was really cool that they could just do this by entering a few pieces of information and clicking their mouse. They wanted a continuously repeatable experience and Likewise Open does just that.
The second concern was around whether this would make sound business sense While basic authentication fits a wide majority of the community, for corporate deployments that have to meet regulatory needs, there are a variety of other pieces of technology that have to be deployed. Most corporations need to be able to configure specific user ids and group ids for their users and provision them through identity management systems. Most corporations secure their infrastructure using Windows group policy. Providing just the authentication framework in a supported open source product would serve as the jump off point for system administrators to see how the Likewise Enterprise version of the product could help them simplify their networks around Active Directory
Once we’ve made the decision to do this, it was just a lot of hard work and fun to get the release out! And there you have it - the story of how Likewise Open came to be.
Likewise is committed to continually improving and releasing Likewise Open. It has been released under the GPLv3 license. We believe that Likewise Open is the best solution available to integrate Linux systems into Windows Active Directory networks and this has been validated by the mainstream Linux distributions endorsing us. As of today, you will see that both Ubuntu and RedHat have made public pronouncements on their intent to integrate Likewise Open in their forthcoming releases.
For myself, I am super excited about the potential of Likewise Open. In the near future, we hope to make more advances releasing many more foundational technologies on Linux/UNIX that form the building blocks of the Windows distributed systems infrastructure.
So give Likewise Open a whirl. Download the bits, and join your Linux system to AD. Make your Linux system a first class citizen in a Windows network!
Thanks for reading!
