Draft OpenID v.Next Discovery working group charter

Phillip Hallam-Baker hallam at gmail.com
Thu Apr 15 04:48:21 UTC 2010


That may be your view of the situation. But the way you argue your
case so aggressively and never listen to any contrary views, I really
don't think you would know the difference between the TAG accepting
your point of view and ending the conversation without changing their
minds at all.

Odd thing I find when talking about XRI is that the conversation never
revolves around the merits of the XRI architecture itself, it is
always what other people are asserted to think about it. In all the
years I have been asking what value XRI brings to the table I have
never once got a direct, simple answer. It has always been arguments
of the form 'its unstoppable' or 'people are very committed to it'.
Yet oddly enough I have never once heard what could be described as an
independent endorsement.

You keep telling me that there are no IPR issues at all and that these
have all been settled. Yet each time I check I find that the IPR
situation is unchanged. You still have effective control of the rights
to issuing those =Drummond identifiers to people.

Take the requirement to support your business model out of the spec
and the whole OpenID spec suddenly becomes a lot simpler and a lot
more useful.



On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:31 PM, Drummond Reed
<drummond.reed at cordance.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 5:47 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> XRI is the only OASIS TC to have failed to gain approval for its
>> specifications from the membership. It was rejected specifically
>> because Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C TAG argued against it as an
>> unnecessary fragmentation of the naming space.
>>
>> Describing it as 'moving forward' as if it was a train that could pull
>> OpenID in its wake is optimistic in the extreme. A more realistic
>> assessment is that XRI is essentially dead for all purposes and OpenID
>> is the only remaining chance for resurrection.
>
> <snip>
>
> Phillip, while I respect your opinion, I just want to note for the record
> that XRI is alive and well. Although the issue with the W3C about namespace
> fragmentation was unfortunate, the issues the W3C had with XRI 2.0 were
> resolved via a mutual dialog between the XRI TC and the W3C TAG within a few
> months, and are now reflected in the XRI Syntax 3.0 spec.
>
> One benefit of this is that XRI 3.0 identifiers are all relative URIs so
> they can be turned into absolute URIs just by binding them to a base URI.
> Thus in their http or https bound form they will all work as OpenID
> identifiers without any special treatment (though that approach will not
> take advantage of their automatic reassignable-to-persistent identifier
> mapping which solves the OpenID recycling problem).
>
> As XRI has matured, the key problem space it is now being directed at is
> semantically meaningful identifiers (e.g., RDF statements encoded in
> identifiers). That's what the OASIS XDI TC is all about. Its work is still
> young but is already being applied to personal data stores.
>
> Since all XRI and XDI resolution (at least as proposed so far) takes place
> on top of DNS, XRI not a competitor to DNS, it's just a higher level of
> abstraction, and like all layers of abstraction is only needed by
> applications built for that layer.
>
> Best,
>
> =Drummond
>



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