What
· Technology
· · Identity
OpenSSO and Enterprisey Open Source ·
[This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog]. A couple of years ago, Sun’s software group launched the OpenSSO project, the open-source version of our big comprehensive suite of identity-management tools. Now, that project is a supported Sun product: OpenSSO Express. I don’t understand the software deeply enough to say anything authoritative about it, but the pricing-and-support model is interesting ...
Sharecropper Alert ·
One of the most interesting pieces of the new Google App Engine is the identity piece ... [17 comments]
Tab Sweep — Tech ·
Today we have Java yielding, thread ranting, REST lecturing, and identity insight ... [6 comments]
OpenID at Work ·
On both the Internet and behind the firewall, the identity problem gets uglier every year. How many passwords do you have? If you’re in IT, how much pain do you go through getting your all your apps to share a notion of who someone is? There are a lot of smart people working on these problems, but progress has been crushingly slow. We’re doing a little something with OpenID this week that won’t turn the world inside out but I think shows that progress is possible ... [11 comments]
OpenID ·
The buzz around OpenID is becoming impossible to ignore. If you don’t know why, check out How To Use OpenID, a screencast by Simon Willison. As it’s used now (unless I’m missing something) OpenID seems pretty useless, but with only a little work (unless I’m missing something) it could be very useful indeed ... [31 comments]
Tab Sweep ·
This is going to be big and have month-old news in it; a consequence of the long southern-hemisphere posting interruption. I’ll even group ’em into paragraphs ...
SAML On The March ·
I tell people I’m a software generalist, but there are lots of holes in my knowledge. One of them is identity and I really must fix that, because it’s a hot pain point both for businesses and individual people. (How many passwords do you have?) Anyhow, our own Eve Maler is one of the people you want to watch in this space, and she’s pointing us at a bunch of action over in SAML-land, here, here, and here. For my money, the hot story is the Danish requirement that if you want to do federation, you should bloody well use SAML. The Danes have had positive experiences with shared standardized XML vocabularies, having scored a big win with UBL. I can’t imagine anything in the short term that would be of greater benefit for everyone than ubiquitous shareable identity services.
Raining on the Parade ·
I guess it’s good that Steve and Scott made nice, and there’s no doubt that when the customers tell you to interoperate, then you bloody well interoperate, so it was a good piece of work (see Pat Patterson’s take in a comment on his own blog). But this glue for linking to Microsoft’s WS-Federation is a second-rate solution at best. Among other reasons, WS-Federation is yet another WS-backroom spec that might change (or go away) any time the people in the backroom want it to; not something I’d advise betting on. If you have products from any two vendors that implement Liberty Alliance specs properly, well, they interoperate. Single sign-on? Yawn. Pretty well everybody is a member, oh except Microsoft. If the customers want single sign-on (and they do want single sign-on), Microsoft should bloody well join Liberty and implement the specs, then they’ll have interoperation with everyone, not just Sun.
I work at Sun Microsystems.
The opinions expressed here are my own,
and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily
agrees with them.
