OpenDJ began as a fork of OpenDS, an LDAP / DSML server which originated in 2005 as an internal project at Sun Microsystems started by Neil A. Wilson, and later grew into an open source project, maintained by Oracle Corporation;[3] following Oracle's acquisition of Sun, OpenDJ is the main trunk developed by ForgeRock.

Sun increased the number of developers working on OpenDS technology after open-sourcing the code.

Mid-September 2010, Ludovic Poitou, then OpenDS community leader and co-project owner, left Oracle for ForgeRock.

[13] In December 2010, ForgeRock released OpenDJ 2.4.0 including fixes and support for new features like Collective Attributes, Microsoft Active Directory Permissive Modification Control, and multiple objectclass inheritance.

[14] In late January 2011 Matthew Swift, previously "responsible for the core server" of the OpenDS project joined ForgeRock to work on OpenDJ as product architect.

[15] Starting in mid-February 2011, ForgeRock began to build an "OpenDJ product suite, comprising an open source LDAP Directory Server, client tools, and LDAP SDK" as a Maven project,[16] with the tools and SDK modules appearing first.

OpenDJ 4.1.4 resumed to maintain by Open Identity Platform Community[28] and issued new release:[29]