Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project [LWN.net]

From:		"Russ DeVeau" <russ-AT-projectliberty.org>
To:		"Russ DeVeau" <russ-AT-projectliberty.org>
Subject:		Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project -- LIBERTY ALLIANCE NEWS
Date:		Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:52:21 -0500

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

 
###

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Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project

Posted Jan 24, 2007 10:23 UTC (Wed) by ajf (subscriber, #10844) [Link]

It means that Microsoft Passport is bad because it is owned by Microsoft.

Why anyone should care in 2007 is left as an exercise for the reader.

Liberty Alliance Announces openLiberty Project

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 :-)