Linux server management start-up Centeris Corp. this week detailed its plans to open-source part of its Likewise Management Suite software by making the software available for download from SourceForge.net.
Centeris decided to put Likewise Open Agent on SourceForge, not on its own Web site, to ensure a wide distribution, according to Barry Crist, CEO of Centeris. "SourceForge is the first place developers look for open-source projects," he said in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference East in Newton, Mass. The open-source download will be available Nov. 18.
The start-up emerged from stealth mode last week to announce a beta release of its first commercial product, Likewise Management Suite, which is designed to allow customers to manage Linux servers in a Microsoft Windows network (see "Start-up promises Linux-Windows server interoperability"). "We had 500 downloads [of Likewise] in the first three days, one-third of them from Germany," Crist said. The full version of Likewise is due to appear in December.
Likewise Open Agent will allow customers to carry out simple Linux server administration tasks -- predominantly file and print sharing, as well as monitoring system performance metrics -- from the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), according to Crist. MMC is a group of administration tools that ship with the Windows operating system. For more sophisticated management tasks such as handling Microsoft's Active Directory or the open-source Apache Web server, customers can use the commercial suite, he said.
The open-source code will be available under the Common Development and Distribution License Version 1.0.
Centeris has joined Microsoft's partner program, according to Crist. "Initial discussions have been positive," he said, adding that Microsoft is coming under increasing pressure from its own customers for more interoperability between Windows and the open-source Linux operating system.
So far, Likewise supports only the two leading Linux distributions from Novell Inc. and Red Hat Inc. Should Centeris see customer demand for support for other Linux distributions, it may provide them or look to the open-source community to do so, Crist said. The start-up's ultimate goal for Likewise Open Agent is to have the software ship with Linux distributions, he said, and Centeris is already in talks with the distribution companies.
Looking ahead, Manny Vellon, vice president of products at Centeris, said the start-up will look to broaden its approach to include more management areas such as configuration, application, database and network management.
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