OpenLDAP

This section of book deals with software used throughout this book. The main intention is to give the reader links and pointers to project homepages and download links. In addition each piece of software is described in short, listing its capabilities, and eventually pros and cons.

Preface

For the past two and a half years I've been heavily involved with deployment of X.509-based infrastructures, working with both in-house and out-of-house proprietary solutions coupled with many several Free Software components. The entire topic had a great influence on me to pursue my future development in this area. I've found it interesting both to deploy the X.509 infrastructure, and services revolving around it, as well as services depending on this technology for the purpose of authentication and authorization.

JBoss AS is a Java EE-certified application server coming from the Free Software giant Red Hat. Coming both as a free (as in beer) piece of software, Red Hat provides commercial support for it as well. It is a powerful application server with many options, although not the most easy piece of software to configure. Still, it provides a viable alternative to proprietary products coming from several industry giants with the ability to make enormous cost-savings. In addition to supporting simple single-instance deployments, JBoss AS can be set-up to work in a clustered environment as well.

Ok, I must say that my first impression weren't too great about this little thing, but the day after I've found myself sitting in front of my desktop computer, staring at the monitor.

After quite a bit of time I've finally managed to get my hand on the AI Touch Book I ordered somewhere around this time last year. The reason why I got it this late is mostly due to fact that the delivery and credit-card charge names (in my case) were not the same.

In the latest turn of events I ran into a problem with my ejabberd server (running for this very domain) somewhere around Friday. All of a sudden, without any change at all, I found myself unable to see the status of all external contacts in my jabber client, Gajim.

Last week, on February 6th and 7th I've had a chance to visit the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) conference which was held in Brussels, Belgium. I flew in from Belgrade through Vienna, and a friend of mine from the Peragro Tempus project, Jell (sueastside), arrived at the airport to welcome me and show me around the city a bit.

Well, I'm still a bit tired, relaxing at the hostel room, after the official closing of FOSDEM 2010 today. This has been the first conference of this type that I've attended, and it has been very interesting. Since I'm tired, I'll just mention some first impressions I had.

In our dealings with Free Software and Free Content we are usually only emphasising the technological and business advantages of it. But recently, after a comment from one of my friends, it occurred to me that there's an important social aspect that we may be missing to mention.