I recently noted that Centeris, which enables the integration of Linux into Microsoft environments, had changed its name to Likewise and launched a new open source authentication project called Likewise Open. This week I was able to catch up with Likewise CEO, Barry Crist, who shared some more details about the company’s products and strategy going forward.

One area in which I did the company a disservice was in doubting its past commitment to open source. While Likewise Open is the company’s first full product distributed with an open source license, there has been plenty of involvement in open source projects behind the scenes.

Likewise is heavily involved with the Samba project, for example, and employs Samba team member Jerry Carter, who is project director for Likewise Open. It also contributes to projects such as OpenLDAP, Kerberos, the GSS API, and single sign on for SSH and PuTTY, amongst others.

A sign of Likewise’s open source credential is that the Likewise Open will be distributed in the next versions of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, while the company is also in talks with Novell regarding SUSE Linux.

Likewise Open enables core Active Directory authentication for Linux systems and Likewise is already seeing significant interest from government and education, according to Crist, who pointed out that the open source product is not just there to seed the market before customers pay for enterprise features.

For customers that are just interested in authentication to reduce management overheads, Likewise Open has everything they need, according to Crist, and customers will only move up to the commercially-licensed Likewise Enterprise when they are looking for Group Policy-based management of Linux machines for compliance requirements and improved efficiency.

While Likewise expects many customers that start off with Open to eventually see the benefits of moving up to Enterprise, Crist said the two products are aimed at fulfilling different needs.

The Enterprise product continues to drive Likewise’s revenue and has built up a customer base of 150 since its launch as Likewise Identity earlier this year. New features in the recently released version 4.0 include treating Linux, Unix and Mac machines as first class citizens through the inclusion of more than 500 Group Policy scenarios.

Version 4 also includes support for centrally-managed Linux desktops via configuration settings that can be set from Active Directory, as well as the ability to manage Active Directory from a Linux machine. This is done via the Likewise Administrative Console, which is a pluggable framework modeled in the Microsoft Management Console.

On the subject of Microsoft, Crist noted that while the software giant is working on Linux interoperability with Novell, integration of Active Directory with Linu is not one of the projects involved (they are working on interoperability between Microsoft Active Directory and Novell eDirectory based on WS-Federation and WS-Security, however), giving it a good opportunity to work with both parties.

Indeed, the company is working with Novell on locking down its customer’s SLED deployments with Likewise Enterprise using existing Active Directory group policies.