Finally, after 8 months of hard work behind the firewall, we've made available the source code of A Point Of Control (APOC) under the freedesktop.org's umbrella. This is the first project released under an open source license by the Sun Ray group for which I work at Sun Microsystems.
What is APOC?
APOC provides capabilities to centrally manage desktops and desktop applications in large scale deployments. It enables system administrators to deliver securely configured open source desktop environments tuned to the needs and privileges of specific users, roles, groups or hosts within the organisation.
Now, any system administrator can create grouped configuration settings as profiles for the most popular open source desktop applications and deploy them in their LDAP servers using their already existing hierarchy.
What applications does APOC support so far?
Support for applications are provided through adapters, so far we have only released the GConf adapter which is in the GNOME's Subversion already. The Firefox/Mozilla adapter will be ready pretty soon.
StarOffice has support for it out of the box already, however, we haven't started any roadmap to release the adapter code as an OpenOffice.org extension yet since we've been pretty busy with the core.
What does this mean from the open source desktop perspective?
It means that a big Unix/Linux deployment using a free software stack is a little bit more tasty for sysadmins, and we're on feature parity with what Microsoft's ActiveDirectory has been offering for a while already on the closed source desktop side.
What license have you chosen?
We have released the code under the CDDL/GPLv2 dual licensing model, as our neighbors from NetBeans has done recently. This will deliver both the flexibility of CDDL and the compatibility with the GPLv2 code out there so we can reach the maximum community audience.
How can I contribute?
We need testers!
Originally the code was developed to run in a small set of supported platforms (Solaris and some version of Linux), we've made some changes to make it more generic and allow people to try it from a wider amount of platforms, we need people to try it and report any issues that may arise.
We need packagers!
We want APOC to be present in most open source operating system distributions, we're supporting Solaris here at Sun already so if you're a distro packager for any of the Linux or *BSD major distributions, you're more than welcome.
We need adapter developers!
So far we only have adapters for the Mozilla/Gnome/OO.org stack. We would love to see adapters developed for other desktop environments and applications (any KDE brave hacker around?), APOC is not desktop specific, it could be useful for any application installed on large scale deployments.
One tip for the OpenSolaris guys, a SMF backend would allow sysadmins to control which services are enabled or disabled on your build farm if an adaper is developed.
Join us!
Visit the APOC website, join the mailing list and the #apoc channel at irc.freenode.net for more information.
Happy hacking!
Congratulations :)
Posted by: rvr | 12/03/2007 at 04:35 PM
How different is this from Sabayon?
Posted by: Rahul Sundaram | 12/03/2007 at 04:52 PM
The APOC About page only mentions CDDL, and says nothing about GPLv2. Also, is this GPLv2, or GPLv2+?
Posted by: anonymous | 12/03/2007 at 04:57 PM
@rvr:
Thanks!
@Rahul:
Sabayon profiles are zip packaeges that are deployed through a remote storage location (which can be pointed from LDAP eventually). To deploy a profile you have to unpack that zip file in each users' home.
However, APOC stores the profile information in the LDAP tree, and the applications retrieve that information through an agent that talks to the LDAP repository.
@anonymous:
Good catch! I forgot to update that, it's GPLv2
Posted by: Alberto Ruiz | 12/03/2007 at 05:08 PM
If this works with blastwave packages, it has the potential to be extremely useful. They, by the way, have a working KDE.
If you're planning on repackaging every OSS app, please think carefully about just integrating with blastwave. Their packages work, the work is already done, and Sun will never be able to maintain 1700+ OSS app packages themselves.
Posted by: Charlie | 12/03/2007 at 05:43 PM
@Charlie:
I'm not sure if I get your point. APOC has nothing to do with any of the Solaris/OpenSolaris packaging efforts. I was just encouraging Linux and *BSD packagers to join the project and provide packages to make APOC easy to install for the average user :)
Posted by: Alberto Ruiz | 12/03/2007 at 05:56 PM
THANKYOU SO MUCH! I was the crazy guy that emailed yourself and several APOC developers awhile back asking for it to be open sourced.
The one thing missing from the "Enterprise 'nix Desktop" was a management system similar to Active Directory. This is awesome.
Posted by: Jeff Schroeder | 12/03/2007 at 08:05 PM
Excellent news, I look forward to playing around with it.
Posted by: TRS-80 | 12/03/2007 at 11:01 PM
Congrats dude - awesome job!
Posted by: Glynn Foster | 12/04/2007 at 06:26 AM
Congratulations! Having been down the path of taking something Sun-internal and open sourcing it myself, I'm guessing you need a holiday right about now :-)
Posted by: Tim Foster | 12/04/2007 at 09:05 AM
Congratulations!
Posted by: faraox | 12/04/2007 at 06:20 PM
Excellent news. We're finding Sun Rays to be the perfect way of keeping users running reliably remotely. The use of CDDL is also great news, because being primarily a FreeBSD shop, one of the issues with have with Linux is licensing. All we're really desperate for now is an Open Sourced Soft Sun Ray client, allowing us to access our desktops without getting involved in SGD.
Posted by: Ian Morrison | 12/06/2007 at 03:12 PM
Nice work.
Congratulations! :-)
Posted by: setepo | 12/08/2007 at 12:43 AM
Does it make sense to look at APOC as deploying Sabayon profiles in a sensible fashion ?
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