OpenSSO - Download, Evaluate, Deploy!!!

A few days ago I was IMing with a guy that works for one of the large systems integrators. They have an opportunity to deploy OpenSSO with a large customer. They particularly want OpenSSO, rather than, say Sun Java System Access Manager 7.1, as they need some of the new features developed over the last few months, in advance of the upcoming Federated Access Manager 8.0 release. The SI discovered OpenSSO, found that it met the needs of their prospective customer, evaluated it for the specific requirement and decided that it was the right solution.

My correspondent mentioned something quite disturbing to me… “[sales person] told me it was ‘forbidden’ to use OpenSSO in commercial environment”. Well, of course, nothing could be further from the truth! If you read my blog, The Aquarium, Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, or just about any other channel of information from Sun, you’ll know that our open source software (and in fact, most of our closed source software) is free for download, evaluation and deployment in any fashion that you see fit. We welcome folks deploying OpenSSO, Glassfish and even Solaris on their production systems, the point being that they often get in touch afterwards saying “We’ve evaluated and deployed X, now we’d like support, so how do we give you some money for that” (this actually really does happen!).

I mention this today because I was in a SEED meeting this morning where Jonathan was speaking (I was going to say that he was the star turn, but he’d be the first to disagree with me on that!). I told the above story to him, and his answer was to blog about it. Oh, and to email a couple of people in Sun on the need to educate our sales force. So here we are, dear reader. OpenSSO - available for deployment wherever, whenever it’s needed.