[OpenID board] Motion: allow use of OpenID trademark on Google Code (part 1 of 2)
Johannes Ernst
jernst at netmesh.us
Mon Jun 1 04:32:42 UTC 2009
So what's wrong with the OIDF helping to assemble an open-source
project that does all of what you say, and that has a name OTHER than
OpenID?
The W3C doesn't call its browser "HTML" either. Imagine if it did.
On May 30, 2009, at 14:58, Chris Messina wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Johannes Ernst <jernst at netmesh.us>
> wrote:
> When the OIDF was started, we explicitly decided that the OIDF would
> not maintain or endorse any particular code base.
>
> I agree that we should not endorse any codebase, but I disagree that
> the foundation should not or can not provide resources,
> infrastructure or act as a convening force to facilitate the
> development of libraries.
>
> The OpenID libraries could be made much more usable, lightweight and
> approachable if effort and resources were put into them. The reality
> is that no one is going to do this "out of the goodness of their
> hearts" (least of all, without community momentum providing a
> different kind of incentive to participate).
>
> We finally have interest from folks to move the PHP library forward,
> and rather than have this work happen off to the side, I would
> really like to see this work happen in plain view, where others will
> see that this work is happening and then become interested in
> joining it.
>
> Ideally we will have a mix of board and regular members of the
> foundation running the project, and maintaining resources related to
> the libraries.
>
>
> While that decision can of course be overturned, I think the
> rationale for it is as good today as it was back then -- we want
> OpenID supporters to agree on the spec, and compete on
> implementations. In my view, that is essential for encouraging the
> growth of a healthy, innovative marketplace of both products and
> ideas.
>
> I don't think that a spec alone is sufficient; you need high quality
> implementations that are also interoperable, and to that end, the
> foundation has an interest and responsibility to encourage the
> collaboration of implementors to create interoperable and compatible
> implementations.
>
> I also agree with using market mechanisms to increase competition,
> but I do not believe that competition will occur until you've
> created a baseline playing field in which to compete. I do think
> that the popup/UI extension is one area were we're seeing alignment
> and competition occur, but it is work that is happening to fill a
> void that has been made manifest by all the different (and
> confusing) implementations of OpenID in the wild.
>
> In other words, I believe that we need planes that are proven to fly
> before we can expect people to build Harrier jump jets on their own.
>
> I think that we've made tremendous progress in the last six months
> on proving the viability of OpenID in the marketplace, but I think
> that we have to double-down and make it *much easier* to implement
> and adopt OpenID, and to have it work well out of the box for folks
> who have not been involved in this community or identity technology
> from the beginning.
>
> And that requires clean libraries and implementations that take
> little fore-knowledge for granted and lead the way towards deploying
> a successful implementation.
>
> We don't have those resources assembled today.
>
>
> There is nothing wrong in my for the foundation to encourage a
> vibrant OpenID open source project. Declaring it to be "the one and
> only" would be a big mistake, however. The naming that's proposed
> implies to me exactly that and that is worrying to me.
>
> I agree with this. And that's not what is implied or intended by
> hosting the OpenID libraries on Google Code. In fact, I hope that we
> can even provide pointers to (or checkouts of) competing
> implementations in the same language in the repository, but document
> their strengths and differences in an accessible way.
>
> At the same time, I think that the goal here is to bring together a
> great deal of effort and might to push these libraries forward; I'm
> approaching using a method that I've found successful in the past
> and will continue to pursue it unless or until someone proposes an
> alternative and is equally willing to seeing it through to completion.
>
> It isn't that my approach is the only one that will work, it's just
> that it's the one that I've used successfully in the past and seems
> appropriate in this context as well.
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> On May 29, 2009, at 18:40, Chris Messina wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Martin Atkins <mart at degeneration.co.uk
>> > wrote:
>>
>> It seems that github also satisfies all of the above requirements,
>> with the advantage of making it easier to pull changes from the
>> individual maintainer repositories due to github being designed
>> with this in mind. Github also supports multiple repositories per
>> account, so each library can have its own repository, maintainers,
>> etc.
>>
>> Yes, but not everyone is familiar with GIT yet. SVN is much more
>> widely known, I would think, in the general world of development at
>> this time.
>>
>> I'm enamored by Github, but that doesn't mean that it's what
>> everyone's using yet.
>>
>>
>> (I'm also a little confused as to what the advantage is of having
>> "a central place to check out", given that the purpose of checking
>> out is to contribute changes and changes will be contributed
>> somewhere else. What is the purpose of checking out a working copy
>> of repository other than the one you want to ultimately commit to?)
>>
>> My goal is raise the visibility of the libraries and the current
>> home on OpenIDEnabled.com has failed to produce a community of
>> active maintainers, from what I've seen.
>>
>> Perhaps it's just a matter of setting up a page at http://openid.net/code
>> that's a cleaned up version of http://wiki.openid.net/Libraries. I
>> could certainly start there.
>>
>> The purpose of checking out the latest stable version of a library
>> (or even latest unstable branch) is to enable folks to run the
>> latest code in their projects and then update them easily when new
>> versions are released. Perhaps tarballs are sufficient, but it
>> seems like giving different communities like WordPress a simple
>> place to do an SVN checkout from would be valuable.
>>
>> Feel free to tell me I'm wrong, or to support my proposal.
>>
>>
>> Both the PHP library and the Perl library I maintain are already on
>> github. I'd be happy to have the libnet-openid-perl repository on
>> my github account (apparentlymart) forked into the openid account
>> on github as long as someone's going to commit to maintaining that
>> fork.
>>
>> Unless someone steps up, it's unlikely to happen, I guess.
>>
>> But therein lies the rub: we have failed to develop a community of
>> maintainers for the OpenID libraries and I think we're worse off
>> for it. I'm attempting to get some momentum for such a community by
>> centralizing at least a listing of the libraries in a familiar
>> place that developers are used to seeing.
>>
>> GitHub doesn't provide a way to customize the homepage of a
>> project, and so we need a place that is clean, approachable, well-
>> designed and is easy for someone on the board (or some other
>> dedicated community member(s)) to maintain.
>>
>> Again, I can start with creating a page on OpenID.net, but the
>> symbolic achievement of having a central repository to me somehow
>> seems important, and is what is motivating my desire to finally
>> make this happen.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>> --
>> Chris Messina
>> Open Web Advocate
>>
>> Website: http://factoryjoe.com
>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina
>> Facebook: http://facebook.com/chrismessina
>>
>> Diso Project: http://diso-project.org
>> OpenID Foundation: http://openid.net
>>
>> This email is: [ ] bloggable [X] ask first [ ] private
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>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>
> Johannes Ernst
> NetMesh Inc.
>
> <lid.gif> <openid.gif> http://netmesh.info/jernst
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
> --
> Chris Messina
> Open Web Advocate
>
> Website: http://factoryjoe.com
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina
> Facebook: http://facebook.com/chrismessina
>
> Diso Project: http://diso-project.org
> OpenID Foundation: http://openid.net
>
> This email is: [ ] bloggable [X] ask first [ ] private
> _______________________________________________
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Johannes Ernst
NetMesh Inc.
http://netmesh.info/jernst
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