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

[Peter Williams]

Fair enough.

This is fine as a developer-centric posture. But, is it really suite to the foundation? ...now appealing to groups wider than coders worried just about libraries?

Should recognize that openid is on a tipping point. It has such massive actual adoption (by folks just don't want to be outmaneuvered), that things only need to tip one small amount ....to go into mass appeal. OpenID + OAUTH may well be it (pargicularly, since the SAML folks are all strungup in self-tied knots on the very concept of fore-ground assertion protocols then supporting web APIs.).

To build the consensus beyond coders, a lot has to do with tone and posture. The foundation needs to be bringing lots of other constituencies to the fore.

For example, you would normally be expecting Gartner and Burton Group to have been bought and paid for in making opinions against openid, by the likes of folks with the kinds of money of involved in running the Liberty Alliance. But note: even these analysts sit on the fence. That's the brand power of Yahoo (OP) and Google (SP) for you! Even MSFT is hedging, just in case.

I have to give credit to the evangelism power of this group. It's quite incredible what you folks have done. But there may be a time to stop evangelizing, so as to capture the momentum. It can slip, just as easy as it can tip.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Hardt [mailto:dick.hardt at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 11:29 AM
To: Peter Williams
Cc: Hans Granqvist; OpenID General
Subject: Re: [OpenID] Q&A: Who gets to vote?


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