[OpenID board] Motion: allow use of OpenID trademark on Google Code (part 1 of 2)

Chris Messina chris.messina at gmail.com
Mon Jun 1 05:03:22 UTC 2009


On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Johannes Ernst <jernst at netmesh.us> wrote:

> We had this discussion before and it lead to the Apache incubator named
> Heraldry. Admittedly that one failed, but I don't think it was because of
> the name ;-)
>

If it wasn't the name, can you describe why it failed. I've heard of
Heraldry, but am not familiar with its structure or fate.


>
> I would have the same misgivings for any project with similar
> organizational and technical circumstances.
>

I am curious how you think that the foundation should best go about creating
or facilitating the creation of the circumstances that would lead to
world-class open source OpenID libraries being developed.

I haven't heard alternative proposals, but I have received some negative
feedback towards my proposals, and yet the libraries are still not writing
themselves.

Chris


>
>
> On May 31, 2009, at 21:46, Chris Messina wrote:
>
> Huh?
> What do you propose we call it then? Are you actually opposed to calling
> the project Google Code "OpenID"? Do you think that
> http://code.google.com/p/oauth was the wrong name for the OAuth project?
>
> On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 9:32 PM, Johannes Ernst <jernst at netmesh.us> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>  _______________________________________________
>>> board mailing list
>>> board at openid.net
>>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>>>
>>>
>>>  Johannes Ernst
>>> NetMesh Inc.
>>>
>>> <lid.gif> <openid.gif> http://netmesh.info/jernst
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> board mailing list
>>> board at openid.net
>>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> board mailing list
>> board at openid.net
>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>>
>>
>>  Johannes Ernst
>> NetMesh Inc.
>>
>> <lid.gif> <openid.gif> http://netmesh.info/jernst
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> board mailing list
>> board at openid.net
>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> 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
>  _______________________________________________
> board mailing list
> board at openid.net
> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>
>
> Johannes Ernst
> NetMesh Inc.
>
>   http://netmesh.info/jernst
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> board mailing list
> board at openid.net
> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>
>


-- 
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

Website: http://factoryjoe.com
Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.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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