Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project Consortium leverages global leadership in developing secure and privacy-respecting identity standards to support the worldwide open source community Liberty Alliance - January 23, 2007 -- Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more trusted Internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide, today announced the openLiberty Project, a global initiative formed to provide resources and support to open source developers building identity-based applications. With today's news, Liberty Alliance has launched openLiberty.org, a portal where developers can collaborate in the openLiberty Project and access tools and information for "jump starting" the development of more secure and privacy-respecting applications based on the widely deployed Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services standards. The openLiberty Project was launched under the direction and leadership of the Liberty Alliance Open Source Special Interest Group. This group was formed to coordinate synergies among global open source initiatives and to identify the open source libraries developers need to build applications that interoperate with Liberty Federation, which consists of ID-FF 1.1, 1.2 and SAML 2.0, and Liberty Web Services, which consists of ID-WSF 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and Liberty People Service specifications. Members of the group have identified the need to focus initially on delivering ID-WSF Web Services Consumer (WSC) libraries to allow open source developers to incorporate SAML 2.0 functionality into Web services applications. OpenLiberty.org is the first portal designed to serve as a comprehensive resource for the global open source community. OpenLiberty.org is where anyone interested in contributing to the architecture, design and development of the openLiberty Project will be able to participate in the project wiki, document repository and discussion lists. The portal will allow developers to access information about other relevant open source efforts, their relationship to the openLiberty Project and links to those efforts. Using a standard Apache licensing model, developers will have access to downloadable member contributed open source code for building applications based on standards from Liberty Alliance. "The openLiberty Project will allow open source developers to incorporate the security and privacy capabilities of Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services into a variety of identity-based applications," said Jason Rouault, vice president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and CTO of Identity Management Software at HP. "OpenLiberty.org will ensure developers have access to open source tools and resources for building applications that can immediately interoperate with Liberty-based deployments worldwide." The openLiberty Project is a growing and evolving initiative where developers can offer resources and share information and ideas to help advance open source identity initiatives. From solutions that support a single identity-based transaction to enterprise and government systems requiring the highest degree of security and privacy protection, openLiberty.org will help developers and system integrators more easily build and deploy a wide range of new identity-based applications. "The launch of openLiberty.org offers new opportunities for developers to leverage the work of Liberty Alliance in order to speed the development of open source identity initiatives," said Roger Sullivan, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice president of Oracle Identity Management. "Liberty Alliance is committed to delivering open source tools and resources to help developers build identity management solutions faster and more successfully." About the openLiberty Project The openLiberty Project has been launched by Liberty members to facilitate and coordinate open source identity initiatives worldwide. Members are working to advance open source identity management solutions that interoperate and offer users the greatest levels of security and privacy protection. The domain name openLiberty.org was donated to Liberty Alliance by HP, a founding member of Liberty Alliance and a member of its management board. More information about the openLiberty Project is available by visiting openLiberty.org ###
Posted Jan 24, 2007 1:05 UTC (Wed)
by njs (subscriber, #40338)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jan 24, 2007 10:23 UTC (Wed)
by ajf (guest, #10844)
[Link]
Why anyone should care in 2007 is left as an exercise for the reader.
Posted Jan 26, 2007 2:13 UTC (Fri)
by jmtapio (guest, #23124)
[Link]
A few comments after having spent a few months working on Liberty stuff
last year. The Liberty Alliance identity stuff basically allows web sites (and why
not other systems as well) to share "common user databases". So each and
every web site does not have to make users register and remember
passwords. They can refer the user to some identity provider for
authentication (the technology does not force one to use any specific
identity provider). The protocols allow pretty much anything from purely
anonymous authentication to sharing user attributes with the users
permission (and much much more if all the protocols are implemented). All in all, it is a really nice concept, but from the perspective of
free software people, it is very business oriented. I think that stuff is
good and useful for adoption, but one needs to be able to get through all
that business jargon. As for this specific implementation. This is not something new. There
already is a really decent free implementation about the Liberty
Alliance basic specs: Lasso by
Entr'ouvert. I can really recommend this package if people end up
experimenting with Liberty. (Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with
Entr'ouvert.) I have had bad experiences with hyping the words "open source" with
Liberty stuff. For example SourceID is open source and it is kind of a
reference implementation for the ID-FF spec, but it is almost entirely
undocumented and poorly debugged (a colleague found out it worked with
only one user account, imagine if a Kerberos implementation worked only
with one user id), and it is almost useless for any real use other than
demos. (Incidentally SourceID was included recently on the list
of "enterprise" software as seen on LWN :-)
Does anyone know what that, uh... *means*?Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project
It means that Microsoft Passport is bad because it is owned by Microsoft.Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project
Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project
Copyright © 2007, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds