For Novell, security and open source belong together. The Waltham, Mass.-based company said Monday that it will submit the programming interfaces for eDirectory to two open-source projects, allowing developers to use Novell's directory program to authenticate network access. Novell also detailed a partnership with Linux security company Astaro to create a security appliance that runs Novell's SuSE Linux operating system.

The announcements were made in conjunction with this week's RSA security show in San Francisco and LinuxWorld conference in Boston. The submitted code is required to use security-related services in Novell's eDirectory, which forms the basis for Novell's suite of identity management software. The contributed software will be managed by the FreeRadius and Samba open-source projects.