Fortress History

In 2009 a team of developers[1], who are brothers, began work on the Open Access Manager project. From the start, the goal was a security authorization system that’s based on open standards and open source. In particular, Role-Based Access Control (ANSI INCITS 359) was a focal point, although that adherence brought with it a need for expanded coverage into other areas like auditing and administration. After a couple of years of coding in their spare time, the project was unveiled at the 2011 LDAPCon in Heidelberg[2], and with it a new name - Fortress. At the same time, it was announced that the OpenLDAP foundation would sponsor the project, and it would be released under a BSD-style variant of an Open Source Software license.

That first release, back in 2011, included just the fortress core and realm components, but development of the web interface (commander) and rest server (enmasse) was already underway. After a few more years, and more releases led to the eventual completion of the others rounding out the product line into what’s available today.

In 2014 the project moved from its OpenLDAP foundation home into the ASF, as a subproject of the Apache Directory.

This new home proved worthy as help from the Apache Directory project, along with its community, has brought new members and improvements.

Footnotes:
[1] Initial team roster in 2009: Kevin McKinney, Kelly McKinney and Shawn McKinney. [2] Presentation Open Source IAM using Fortress and OpenLDAP