[OpenID] Press Release

Thu Feb 7 16:56:19 UTC 2008

That's fine, if life turns out that way. But lets see: I've seen many a standards committee try to rig  a particular view of operational culture through compliance rules, and domineering spinware. The foundation looks overly tech-heavy. It may need some independents - folks who can turn the conscience of corporate culture but not become obstructionist to a tech-lead initiative (and I've seen lots of obstructionist independents, too!)

US Realty has ~1000 namespaces, whose fields address largely the same housing features, in each market. All attempts in the (NAR) trade association - a group with about a million members and large sums to lobby Congress with - to get buyin to "standard names" has largely failed - mostly because local communities see great (cultural) value in their local choice of name or additional selling feature (of your property) that has great relevance in one area - when marketing "island" properties - but has no relevance in others  - when marketing a condo in a downtown building complex. Unlike Google (which markets names globally), realtors typically market only in a 5mile radius area. The pricing and marketing dynamics in that area may be quite different to the area with the same house plans that is just "up the hill"... Thus local names have a propensity to stick around and are often, in fact, a way of distinguishing a particular real estate investment culture and its the realty sub-markets that a commercial property investor, say, creates.

Are these namespaces proprietary? Well in as sense they are (not that they have any direct value). They are the work product and practices design of the 500 Realtors who make up city X, in State Y. Usually, the namespace has sub-name spaces - the terms of art used by the 10 realtors who are specializing in the _future_ commercial property in that new shopping zone the city government is thinking about issuing a bond for, where the old steel mill used to be.... The field will probably be called BondX= with sub-values that are an enumation (zone A, zone B ,zone C) which mean absolutely nothing of course to the rest of the world outside that 5 mile area and that city's financing budgets, but which imply property valuation and investment potential - that obviously affects current and futures pricing.

Now, we have all those names, and their mappings onto standard names. We have the names the magazine publishers use (e.g. Google listing snippets posted off up into GoogleBase, amongst 10,000 others places) And, at this point its trivial to map some of the fields into yet more "standard names" defined in openid AX. But, when the realtor wants the local name for the same thing, I have to be able to deliver it. Otherwise your 50+ year old grandmother who has sold houses for 20 years will be very upset with me. At least 500,000 grandmothers make up NAR and they often apply a collective lobbying voice that makes Congressmen tremble. Woebetide the IT person that decides to change a screen layout... or the name or order of presentation of bath# vs bathroom-permits#!

________________________________

From: Dick Hardt [mailto:dick at sxip.com]
Sent: Thu 2/7/2008 8:13 AM
To: Peter Williams
Cc: Bill Washburn; OpenID List
Subject: Re: [OpenID] Press Release

Peter

I would imagine the intent of the phrase is to keep the core of 
OpenID from becoming proprietary.

I would encourage you to define new properties in your own namespace 
for your sub-community. If there is a reason why they need to be 
proprietary -- ie you want to control who can use them, I don't see 
that as evil. I would expect that many of the new properties would be 
of interest to all members in the sub-community.

The OpenID Foundation does not determine the protocol. The protocol 
is determined by the community. Extensions and enhancements are 
determined by the community. Anyone of course can write their own 
extensions, and they can be proprietary. They just won't be able to 
be called part of OpenID if they are not approved according to the 
OpenID Intellectual Property Process.

        http://openid.net/ipr/OpenID_Process_Document_
(Final_Clean_20071221).pdf

-- Dick

On 7-Feb-08, at 7:52 AM, Peter Williams wrote:

> What does this mean?
>
> "OpenID was always intended to be a decentralized sign-on system, 
> so it's fantastic to join a foundation committed to keeping it free 
> and unencumbered by proprietary extensions."
>
> If I want for my sub-community to define my own namespace in the AX 
> protocol (as the technology allows), am I an evil "proprietary 
> extension maker"?
>
> If I want to define my own tags for use the the extensible XRD, am 
> I an evil...
>
> Can only the OpenID Foundation use all those extension points in 
> the protocol?
>
> Unlike SSL (which allows for privately defined extensions), and 
> unlike X.509 (which allows for privately defined extensions), in 
> OpenID culture will there be can be allowance for privately defined 
> extensions?
>
> I think we need an explicit mechanism for denoting which extensions 
> are privately-defined (and which therefore have community blessing 
> for their creation and use in the defined sub-community).
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: general-bounces at openid.net on behalf of Bill Washburn
> Sent: Thu 2/7/2008 7:26 AM
> To: OpenID List
> Subject: [OpenID] Press Release
>
>
> FYI...
>
> http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=818650
>
>
>
>
> SOURCE: OpenID Foundation
>
>  <http://openid.net/foundation>              
> Feb 07, 2008 09:00 ET
>
> Technology Leaders Join OpenID Foundation to Promote Open Identity 
> Management on the Web
>
>
> OpenID Foundation to Support Internet User Single Sign-On Technology
>
>
> CORVALLIS, OR--(Marketwire - February 7, 2008) - The OpenID 
> Foundation <http://openid.net/foundation>  today announced that 
> Google (NASDAQ: GOOG <http://www.marketwire.com/mw/stock.jsp? 
> Ticker=GOOG> ), IBM (NYSE: IBM <http://www.ibm.com/investor/> ), 
> Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT <http://www.marketwire.com/mw/stock.jsp? 
> Ticker=MSFT> ), VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN <http://www.marketwire.com/ 
> mw/stock.jsp?Ticker=VRSN> ) and Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO <http:// 
> www.marketwire.com/mw/stock.jsp?Ticker=YHOO> ) have joined as its 
> first corporate board members.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/general
>
>