Gates Says Microsoft Will Support OpenID

An anonymous reader writes "In his RSA conference keynote today, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft will support the decentralized OpenID digital identity protocol, in addition to WS-* and CardSpace (transcribed notes, video). From its roots in LID, i-names, and Sxip, the first major deployment in LiveJournal, and now with support from Techorati, Magnolia, Symantec, a suspected mass-deployment by AOL, and a number of startups — using URLs as digital identities has caught hold."

Comments

Embrace,

[rrohbeck]

extend, ...
You know the rest.

Re:Embrace,

[Bogtha]

Going back to OpenID, all I need to do is supply my own authentication server, and I have corroborated my own identification.

Trust and identity are two different things. You're talking about trust. The fact that you can make up multiple identities doesn't matter unless you want somebody to trust one of them for something.

Trust is a big problem; moreso than identity. Furthermore, trust systems have identity as a requirement. And identity is useful outside of any advanced trust system. It makes sense to solve the identity problem first before moving on to complicated web of trust models.

The OpenID people are careful to distinguish between identity and trust. Trust is outside the scope of OpenID, but it's likely that any worthwhile trust system can be built on top of OpenID. You shouldn't use lack of trust as a basis to reject OpenID; in fact large-scale adoption of OpenID may well be helpful in developing a decent trust system.

PS: The one organisation that I expected to support OpenID much sooner than this is Google. Anybody have any ideas why they haven't jumped on board yet?