Earlier this year, while writing about the fortunes of Linux on the enterprise desktop, I came across the paper, "World Domination as an Optimization Hack," in which the GNOME Foundation's Federico Mena-Quintero identifies bulk Linux deployments as the lowest hanging fruit for Linux moving forward.

Although Mena-Quintero doesn't call it out explicitly, the common thread that runs through administrator feedback he presents in the paper is the absence of directory services and the management functions, such as Group Policy, that these services make possible.

I finally got around to columnizing about open source's directory services leadership vacuum:

It's the Directory, Stupid

Opinion: Until Red Hat, Novell, or another party focuses around open-source directory services, Linux will be stuck playing catch-up with Windows 2000.

Doesn't Linux need an answer to Active Directory? Is Samba 4 the way forward? Fedora Directory Server? OpenLDAP? FreeIPA?

I'd love to hear what you think about it...