In 1996, the developers of the
University of Michigan SLAPD project were hired by
Netscape Communications Corporation. The codebase was
forked, and became known as the
Netscape Directory Server (NDS). After acquiring Netscape,
America Online sold ownership of the NDS
intellectual property to
Sun Microsystems, but retained
rights akin to ownership. Sun later developed and sold their own version of the server under the name
Sun ONE Directory Server, as part of the
Java Enterprise System; with the transfer of property in the
acquisition of Sun Microsystems,
Oracle Corporation retained the code under development by Sun, where it became
Oracle Directory Server. AOL's rights were then later acquired by Red Hat, and on June 1, 2005, much of the original
source code of the project prior to Sun's development was released as
free software under the terms of the
GNU General Public License (GPL). As of 389 Directory Server version 1.0 (December 1, 2005), Red Hat released as
free software all the remaining source code for all components included in the release package (admin server, console, etc.) and continues to maintain them under their respective licenses. In May 2009, the Fedora Directory Server project changed its name to 389 to give the project a distribution- and vendor-neutral name and encourage porting or running the software on other operating systems. ==Features==