Open Directory is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s enterprise directory standard, Active Directory. Open Directory is the directory service and network authentication architecture at the core of Mac OS X Server starting with OS X Server 10.3 “Panther”. As with most of Apple’s technologies Open Directory is based on an open source technology, OpenLDAP, as well as its primary authentication protocol, Kerberos, which is borrowed from MIT’s Kerberos project

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As a company, Apple has a very long history but Mac OS X’s history is actually more closely tied to its current CEO, Steven P. Jobs. Although Steve Jobs founded Apple Computers, now Apple Inc., with his friend Steve “Woz” Wozniak, he was demoted from his executive position on May 31, 1985 and then resigned on September 13, 1985. During his time away he formed a company by the name of NeXT Inc. Steve Jobs’ new company was in business from 1985 until December 20, 1996 when it was bought out by Apple.

The seed was planted for Mac OS X’s birth in 1985 when Steve Jobs met with Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate and biochemist from Stanford, at an event held in Silicon Valley. Berg complained to Jobs about the of expense in teaching students about recombinant DNA from textbooks instead of in the wet lab. Berg explained to Jobs that he needed Apple to create something similar to a 3M workstation, due to the fact that they had more than 1MB of RAM, a megapixel display and over a megaflop of performance.

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An incredible product for businesses looking into purchasing a server on a budget. The biggest difference between Mac OS X Server and its competitors is the licensing model Apple has chosen to use. Mac OS X Server 10.4 offers a wallop of features at its $499 price point for 10-clients. If there is a need for greater than 10 users Apple also offers an unlimited client version that is only limited by the processing power of the server it is installed onto. My testing has revolved around the unlimited client version which will be the focus of this post, but both versions contain the exact same feature set.

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