[OpenID] Q&A: Who gets to vote?

[Dick Hardt]

On 18-Sep-08, at 11:15 AM, Peter Williams wrote:

> I suspect he is serious. And, woe betide anyone who doesn't use the  
> openid website as the push/promotion point.
>
> Not sure why this position is so important. I suspect it's just one  
> person mental model of where "appropriate" competition lies, to  
> "best serve" the community. As such, Ill guess that its just a  
> personal viewpoint - as such views on "competition management"  
> usually vary, widely.

My comment was a clarification on what a number of people on the lists  
have posted in the past that had discouraged Jack.

We all have limited resources. Why build multiple open source  
implementations? Better to unite the efforts in my view and we all  
spend our time further up the stack on differentiating what we did  
with OpenID. Anyone of course can write their own, proprietary OpenID  
stack.

Verisign thought it was better to build their own Java library for  
OpenID

An important part of an open specification is having multiple  
implementations. This ensures that the specification is complete, open  
and interoperable. Given the development of libraries for different  
platforms, we could interop test the different libraries to check for  
holes in the spec and to ensure the spec was complete. (which we did a  
while ago)

>
> AS you say, 99.9% of the internet uses the opposite model of  
> promoting code implementation, and always has.

your mixing apples and oranges

I have LOTS of experience with open source libraries from my time at  
ActiveState. Developers want to get THE library to work with a  
technology. They don't to have to test out several to see which one  
works and fits their needs best.

-- Dick