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The Liberty Alliance Grows Again

Posted by Hemos on from the now-if-they-would-just-do-something dept.

sempf writes "The Liberty Alliance, a Sun-backed open-specification alternative to the Microsoft platform's Passport system, has added two very powerful members, Oracle and Intel. Now over 150 members, one wonders at the future of a world where we have two single sign-on systems. With the three big IM platforms joining forces, is the identity standard of the world going to be Microsoft, or Sun? Is this going to be the next Browser War?"

5 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No. by 16K+Ram+Pack · · Score: 5, Interesting
    That's for a number of reasons.

    - You have to pay to use it for your site.

    - Lots of people don't trust Microsoft's security.

    - Some people are concerned about single platform/single corporation.

    I'd love to have a single ID.

  2. They're all terrified of MS' power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So they're all finally joining forces.

    Intel is terrified that Longhorn's .NET hardware independent toolset will allow MS to move away from x86 at will and set up their own chip division. MS can't grow their software division much more in a saturated market, but if they use their own chipset (or licence it to a couple of 3rd party suppliers) they can take over all of Intel's current profit.

    Oracle is of course competing against SQL Server.

    All these large IT companies have known for years that MS is going to eat their lunch, but they couldn't work out what to do about it.

    The penny has finally dropped - the only way to combat MS is for them all to work together using common standards : hence, their support for Linux, the Liberty Alliance, J2EE and so on.

    1. Re:They're all terrified of MS' power by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Actually, I think Intel is more keen to ditch x86 than MS. They tried to with the i860. They are trying with the IA64. I recall a few months ago an Intel representative stating that they thought x86 only had a couple of generations left. Unfortunately, they can't jump ship if AMD doesn't. Hopefully Longhorn will ship for several CPU architectures (as NT did), and will include something based on VirtualPC for running legacy x86 code.

      Note that the only non-x86 architecture properly supported by Windows at the moment is IA64.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. A pretty good standard by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Liberty is a pretty good standard, it allows federated and distributed authoring instead of Microsoft's "only we know who you are" approach.

    It's a shame that everything this alliance has produced up to date is just a pile of PDF specifications. Hope it will change soon.

  4. Re:No. by blowdart · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Yes, but is anyone actually using Liberty? It's all very well signing companies on, but what web sites actually use the damned thing?

    Reading the testimonials it's all fluffy, without implementation (excluding one company which seems to use it for internal enterprise authenication, which is a way different market to Passport)