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Sun Releases Open Source Tool for Project Liberty
ruisantos writes "After submiting the technical specifications for the project , Sun has finally launched an open source tool for its upcoming Sun ONE Identity Server version 6.0, the news can be found on CNET news."
The Liberty Alliance is a group of companies helping to define the specification. Sun propsed Project Liberty as an alternative to Passport. Sun have implemented the specification in their Sun ONE range of products. You will probably see Novell implement the specification within eDirectory as they are members of the alliance as well. As for selling the idea to anyone, it is not a matter of selling it, if you look at the specs it sells itself. Devolved identity management, no single company holding identity information, like Microsoft does with Passport.
My brother works at fedex and they are turning into an all Windows shop.
This assertion is completely and utterly incorrect. It is so far from the truth that one might consider it a deliberate fabrication. Real core production FedEx systems revolve around serious IBM mainframe hardware. Nothing else really supports the necessary transaction volume. Many applications are front-ended by web interfaces running on lots and lots of Sun servers. And Sun boxes being phased out are being upgraded, not replaced. No one at FedEx seriously considers Windows for any core business application, server side. No way it could handle the volumes of data.
For example, one of our smallest non-core-business systems handles maintenance on our vehicles. We periodically look for an off-the-shelf system to buy. Vendors come in all bright and happy and tell us how wonderful their application is. It's easy to use and runs on nice commodity PC hardware under Windows. They tell us they have customers supporting fleets with several thousand vehicles with no problems. And they say it as if we should be impressed about someone operating fleets of 1, 2 or even 3 or 4 thousand trucks. We say, "Great! We have over 160,000 assets, over 60,000 of which are big rigs alone. We have more than 2,000 mechanics scattered over the globe performing 5,000-10,000 different repair actions on those assets every business day, year round, to keep them running. Those repairs generate 500-1000 potential vendor warranty claims per day which must be processed and filed as fast as they are created. And we must automate every possible part of the process chain that we can. Oh, and we need to retain all that data on-line for anywhere from 18 months to 5 years for various business and regulatory reasons. Can your system handle that?" And they look back with a deer-in-the-headlights look and promise to get back to us. And back we go to those old mainframes just chugging happily along, with nice spiffy web front-ends and feeding big honkin' data warehouses on Sun servers. And this is an example of one of the tiniest systems we have! Never mind about really important stuff like flight planning, scheduling or, heaven forbid, the Sort!
Oh, and we can't forget the millions of lines of custom COBOL that have been written and tailored to FedEx business processes. Code that would take some terrible amount of programmer-decades to re-engineer if we ever moved off mainframes.
Just because your delivery-truck driving brother uses a Windows PC at his station or strapped to his wrist does not at all mean that FedEx is in any way using Windows for anything other than client access. We use what makes sense, where it makes sense. For clients, at this point in history that's mostly Windows. For most everything else with really big requirements, Windows just doesn't make sense, whether for reliability, scalability or performance.