NEW ORLEANS, LA- June 1, 2005 - The Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported, open source collaboration project, today announced at the Red Hat Summit the availability of Fedora Directory Server. By making Fedora Directory Server freely available to the open source development community, Red Hat is enabling and encouraging the development of secure, enterprise technologies and providing customers and partners with increased choice. The availability of Fedora Directory Server licensed under the GPL underscores Red Hat's true commitment to open source innovation.

Fedora Directory Server is based on components of the technology assets Red Hat acquired from the Netscape Security Solutions division of America Online in September of 2004. Since that time Red Hat has been working to license the core components of the Directory Server code under the GPL and make them available for ongoing open source development. Remaining components will be made open source in the coming months, but are being offered as freely-redistributable technologies today as part of the Fedora Directory Server Project.

"The free availability of Fedora Directory Server marks an important milestone for open source identity management," said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of Engineering, Infrastructure Technologies at Red Hat. "There is now a standards-based, open source solution available in a market that has been historically dominated by high-cost proprietary options. Red Hat is looking forward to working with the extended community involved with the Fedora Project to bring this technology forward and create a highly secure and innovative technology which meets the demands of increasingly complex infrastructures."

Fedora Directory Server is a highly scalable LDAP compliant server that provides infrastructure security and manageability by centralizing application settings, user profiles, group data, policies and access control information into a networked-based directory. Management is further simplified by features such as multi-master replication and automated recovery. Administrators have the ability to improve security of networks by deploying a single authentication source.

"We applaud Red Hat's continuing commitment to Open Source and to supporting so many great projects like Fedora Directory Services and OpenLDAP to the benefit of Linux users everywhere," said Marty Heyman, President of Symas Corporation, a leading provider of open source LDAP technologies. "Symas sees great opportunities for community development of significantly improved Identity Management capabilities for all LDAP users."

Freely available to the worldwide development community, the Fedora Directory Server project will grow both the adoption and technology evolution of a proven, scalable identity store. With upcoming releases of new offerings, Red Hat will provide solutions based on these technologies for enterprises desiring fully supported, mission-critical identity management infrastructures.

Fedora Directory Server is now available for download at http://directory.fedora.redhat.com. It is compatible with Fedora Core 3 and Solaris 9. A suite of Directory Server Configuration Tools, which will be open sourced in the near future, is provided in binary form as an added convenience to contributors and developers. Red Hat plans to continue to release technologies to the Fedora communities; Fedora Global File System (GFS) is the next release planned. For information on how to become involved in the Fedora Project please visit http://www.fedora.redhat.com

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