[OpenID] Press Release

[Peter Williams]

I think we are clear - peter doesn't spent long enough on reading formal emails, that's all. As I often say, peter is pretty dumb.

We have learned to be clear that tho openid.axschema is referenced in the final spec of ax, it is non normative. Its model is not required for ax compliance, nor is its metadata model and implementation is not currently mandatory. Its an openid community project, focussed on a "public" schema. It invites contributions, under the openid ipr rules. One day, the board may accept stewardship of the final ipr in that work and agree its a finalized spec, once the contributors have reached that consensus.

Meantime, folks who are merely users of openid technology (but who are not be part of the community in the contributing ipr sense) may also define namespaces and types, probably for use in private sub-communities. Those documents may even represent proprietary business practices, possibly subject to legal or moral constraints (just like foaf). As of today, the openid foundation board and all its members do not intend anyone to construe that mere production and/or use of either such private or proprietary ax namespaces and attribute types is anything other than an example of perfectly acceptable and appropriate community citizenship, by users of the ax extension to openid2. As Dick indicated, folks may wish to publish such namespaces and type specifications, much as realty has already done with its standard names/types work, to generally help promote the adoption of the openid approach. 

Recent pr adresssing the boards position taking a position against "inappropriate" work on extending openid by persons unknown did not, repeat not, refer to the topics discussed above. 

Governance conversations on this topic are now over, as far as im concerned. Talk offline if im even subtely off course in this position. Im moving back to technical work on applying ax to form filling in realty applications, post websso. 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Recordon <drecordon at sixapart.com>
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:15 PM
To: Dick Hardt <dick at sxip.com>; Peter Williams <pwilliams at rapattoni.com>
Cc: OpenID List <general at openid.net>
Subject: Re: [OpenID] Press Release

I'd have to agree with Dick.  I thought we've been very clear (such as  
in http://openid.net/2008/02/07/evolving-the-openid-foundation-board/)  
that the Foundation does not make specification decisions by saying  
"While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the  
community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does  
not make any decisions about the specifications the community is  
collaboratively building", but the feedback that we as a community are  
not being clear enough is useful.

Thanks,
--David

On Feb 7, 2008, at 1:35 PM, Dick Hardt wrote:

>
>
> On 7-Feb-08, at 11:41 AM, Peter Williams wrote:
>>
>> If the Foundation has an intent or even a latent desire to have
>> organized realty brings its 1000+, forever-changing AX-style LOCAL
>> namespaces to the board for ratification when deploying openid2, it
>> ain't gonna happen.
>
> The OpenID board does not vote on the specifications. The community
> does.
> Please read the IPR Process so that you understand how things work.
>
>>
>> As a gesture of support by a vertical industry for the Foundation,
>> we could perhaps seek re-ratification of what we call our existing
>> "Standard Names" namespace, however?
>
> The board does not ratify any specifications.
>
> Additionally, the AX was intentionally designed so that ANYONE can
> define their own attributes in any DNS namespace they control without
> coordinating with anyone else.
>
> If the properties you define might be useful to others, then you may
> want to advertise them so that other people could use them.
>
> You will notice that there are no AX attributes defined at openid.net.
>
> If this is _still_ confusing, we shold take this offline.
>
> -- Dick
>
> fyi: I find the 90% comment above somewhat insulting.
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