You can find some information on this at the "On The Record" blog, including a link to the official text of the NAC. Now let's hope that more folks issue a similar covenant.

This time, Eve was faster than me ...

tag: Identity, OpenID, Open Source, iiw2007, sunopenid

Drummond blogged about semantically meaningful identifiers - really interesting. I particularly like his example ... and Drummond: I am perfectly happy for you to use my identifier in this example

tag: identity, XRI, OpenID

Wow, sensible ideas *do* seem to spread by themselves ... I just read in eWeek that more and more companies are using desktop virtualization. No kidding. I have been using desktop virtualization for more than 4 years now, with my production machine (Email, Blog reading, OpenOffice, etc.) virtualized now for almost a year. Anything else would be totally insane for me, especially since I use a lot of beta (or alpha) software that has a tendency to break certain OSes.

tag: Virtualization

Mike Jones has blogged about Microsoft's latest OSP covered specification. Large chunks of the InfoCard protocols that appeared on Kim's blog over time are now in this refatored version of the spec. I did not have the time yet to go through this in detail, but I am quite interested to figure out if I can build a managed card provider and consumer based solely on this spec. Mike assures me that this works, so I hope to report back about this soon ...

BTW: Thanks for all your work, Mike (and Kim, of course).

tag: Identity, Microsoft, InfoCard

Last night's untalend show was - as usual - quite interesting. Here is the lyrics of some of Eve's andmy song (snippets):

Twinkle, twinkle WS-Star
How I wonder what you are

Architecture in the sky
Now in part in WS-I

Twinkle, twinkle WS-Star
How I wonder what you are
(traditional)

and

Bye, Bye, Mr. InfoCard guy
May be managed some day later
Now he's self-certified

When he left Dot Net
And kissed Kim Cameron goodbye
Saying "Soon I'm gonna be a profile,
soon I'm gonna be a profile."
(after Wierd Al - The Saga Begins, after Don McLean - American Pie)

tag: IIW2007, un-talent

Today, we (pre)-announced at the IIW 2007 a non-assertion covenant (NAC) for OpenID. What does this mean?

First, the NAC is a short (three paragraphs) legally binding document that licenses all of Sun's patents (and not only necessary claims) to anybody for the purpose of implementing OpenID 1.1 Auth and Simple Reg 1.0 ... in perpetuity ... royalty-free. This license will only be withdrawn, if someone decides to sue Sun over this technology.As far as I know, this is the first covenant like this around OpenID.

Sun has issued already some of these - one on ODF and another one on SAML. Everytime, this prompted similar licenses and promises from other companies. Note that this move is so far totally unilateral - we (Sun) clear the way for the OpenID community as much as we can. Now it is up to other companies to do the same thing and show their commitment to the open source community.

The official announcement of this NAC will appear soon on the "On the Record" marketing blog at blogs.sun.com.

Finally, here is a picture by David showing Eve, Bill and myself making the announcement:

tag: OpenID, sunopenid, IIW2007, opensource

Here are my slides to yesterday's mini talk in the java.net community corner.

OpenID JavaOne.pdf (380.11 KB)

tag: identity, OpenID, sunopenid

I will be giving an OpenID talk at JavaOne this afternoon at 4:00pm in the java.net Community Corner in the Pavilion. In this, I will explain Sun's recent press announcement and shed some light on what we are planning to do next. Slides (and a podcast) will be available soon at the community wiki.

tag: OpenID, identity, sunopenid

Marina Fisher and I will be presenting on AJAX interoperability here at JavaOne on Thursday at 5:30pm in Esplanade 302. We will be covering jMaki, WCF, Silverlight/ASP.NET AJAX and Java REST API interoperability. For more details, go here. 

tag: AJAX, jMaki, Silverlight, Interoperability

In the free VMWare Server edition, there is no vmfstools program that could be used to extend and manage virtual drives, as it would be e.g. needed to extend boot partitions. Instead, the program is called vmware-vdiskmanager and performs - as far as I can tell - the same function.

tag: vmware, diskutilities

Paul has a wonderful letter to Hubert on his blog ... Sorry Paul, 5 CDN will not do - but here is a web site that might help

tag: identity, OpenID, opensource, sunopenid

As a response to Johannes' post (Thanks, Johannes!), here is an unordered list of all folks that have been contributing to OpenID - Thanks to all of you:

• Hubert Le van Gong
• Wajih Ahmed
  
• Yvonne Wilson 
  
• Lauren Wood
• Rich Sharples
• Eve Maler
• Paul Bryan
• Pat Patterson
• Erica Pereiras
• Tim Bray
  
• Carolyne Wong
• Terry Palanca
• Jodie Pastor
  
• Jacki DeCoster

and many, many, more ...

tag: identity, OpenID, opensource, sunopenid

Today, Sun is announcing (Press Release) a new program to explore how OpenID can be used and utilized in a corporate environment.

As a first step, we are creating an IdP exclusively for Sun employees. What is the rationale for this, especially since there is an ever growing number of OpenID IdPs available for anybody to sign up? In principal, there is – obviously – no difference. However, the big difference is that by creating an IdP at sun.com and creating a process and policies around account this IdP, we create a trust base for relying parties: anyone accepting a sun.com OpenID authentication is assured that the holder is a Sun employee. This knowledge can be applied to customize the user experience to the Sun employee (e.g. for a special discount).

This IdP is implemented as an extension to OpenSSO/Sun Access Manager. By putting the OpenID protocol on this proven platform, we can simply extend this reliable and secure platform to new set of clients and relying parties, while offering SAML/Liberty federation and authentication from a single IdP. Today, OpenID is still simply another access protocol for relying parties, but going forward combination of OpenID with the power and capabilities of SAML will enable a variety of interesting applications. The extension is also available for OpenDS.

Over the next couple of months, we will release a number of new services and ideas around OpenID. One of the more interesting areas (I think) will be convergence and interoperability. Stay tuned!

Finally, on a personal note: I really enjoyed working with everybody on this project. Given the little time and resources I think we really got this done right.

tag: identity, OpenID, OpenSSO, opensource