[OpenID] why is xri so obtuse?

[Kaliya *]

One of the things I am working on this week writing up some community
history.

What does free mean? In the context of open standards this is a valid
question.   Originally the IP that is in XRI was all tied up and owned by a
company.  It was working on bringing it to market....at a meeting attended
by internet notables about it....basically they said this is great but it
will NEVER work if you own the IP no one will adopt it.

So the company did the right thing and turned over all the IP to a nonprofit
to be held for the public good - XDI.ORG (it was originally XNSORG).

It was clear that a name space was a critical element of this technology -
- this would have to be run by someone.  This is what this company does
now...It runs a global registry for the namespace.  People are not howling
wildly that OpenID is based on domain names that you must pay a yearly fee
for.  Both are world wide infrastructure that needs to work otherwise the
web doesn't work. Money needs to come from somewhere to pay for it and
registration of names is one place to do that.   (Yes I have heard from my
anarchist geek friends about how in theory it would be possible to do
addressing in ways without a central root).

The XRI/XDI community is small but vibrant and working really hard to
develop open source code that folks can use to do all sorts of stuff.   It
has a range of folks participating in it including domain registrars from
around the world, Boeing, Higgins project, small starups.  The community
that founded the first Identity Commons had extensive connection to the
i-names technology because at the time...3-4 years ago it was the only
user-centric game in town.

In terms of the including of XRI's in OpenID. .. I already said it before in
this thread there was 3 different valid approaches for distributed
user-centric identity that were all going to go to market and
compete...imagine if there was 3 different login boxes that were
proliferating....you all wouldn't be here adopting the one thing that
everyone worked hard on for a year to get convergence (The 4th approach even
joined our efforts in the summer).    There is momentum behind what is now
branded OpenID2 because all these different efforts collaborated.

We had a period where we considered a different like Yaids or a name to be
determined...it was decided that we not move away from the most
unrecognizable brand but update it to a version 2.

I am happy to answer any more questions about how we got here or why things
are the way they are. I have been working in this little niche for almost
three years full time.  Some folks like Drummond have been working on
brining about this sort of technology for 15 years.   There are 'really
simple' easy ways to do things - how OpenID started out. There are ways to
deal with more complex use-cases and business needs too.  Having a balance
and supporting things working together is what this is about.

Just so it is not a surprise the OpenID folks are talking to the SAML folks
about how those two standards can work well together.

=Kaliya
On 1/1/07, Dmitry Shechtman <damnian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I just realized that I missed a spot. The "kind suggestion" refers to a
> part
> from Victor's response he had chosen to omit for some reason:
>
> > I'd be willing to test your application with my i-name when you're
> ready,
> if that helps.
>
> _______________________________________________
> general mailing list
> general at openid.net
> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/general
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-general/attachments/20070101/6a6c74a0/attachment-0002.htm>