[OpenID] JanRain library licensing (was: Re: On OpenID 2.0)

[Guido Sohne]

On 5/16/07, Dries Buytaert <dries at buytaert.net> wrote:
> On 11 May 2007, at 20:06, Josh Hoyt wrote:
> > There are already many implementations. If your interest is in
> > interoperability or spec conformance, your time would be much better
> > spent working on conformance testing tools or just testing *existing*
> > implementations against each other. One of the reasons that I always
> > encourage people to use the libraries that JanRain wrote is so that
> > we'll get more in-the-wild testing in different environments and get
> > feedback that helps us resolve issues.

Recently, a client needed an OpenID server. They were using Erlang. No
JanRain for me, so I wrote an OpenID 1.1 server. How does depending on
a single family of excellent libraries help when they aren't available
in the target platform?

> What you should focus on, IMO, is a (a) well-documented reference
> implementation and (b) conformance tests that others can use to
> validate their own implementations.  This is common practice -- and
> is what people do with XML-RPC servers, RSS/Atom feeds, Jabber, SMTP,
> HTTP, Java Virtual Machines, you name it.

+1 - it was very useful to run against the JanRain acceptance tests
but I believe they could be a little more thorough. After getting full
acceptance, LiveJournal still wouldn't work, due to URL escaping
issues (my fault).

But on a parting note: the poor, poor JanRain people. They had to code
in PHP (the horrors!) and then they say the code isn't wanted? Then
again 12Kb versus 290Kb is something else entirely.

-- G.