Foundation Gathering, Open Sourcing ID Technology

The OpenID Foundation introduces a message bus with identity capabilities as part of plan to create venue where ID technology can be vetted, open sourced and made available to enterprises, Web site operators and others.

The OpenID Foundation is quietly gathering technology and open source projects in hopes of establishing a neutral location where enterprises can get vetted identity resources separated from the financial interest of vendors.

The Foundation opened up on its plans Monday at the annual Cloud Identity Summit and introduced the newest open source project it is shepherding, a sort of Mash Up 2.0 with security built in via identity. “Different parties of interest create a protocol and bring it to the foundation to open source it,” said Don Thibeau, executive director of the OpenID Foundation. “We are going to see more of that. ”

The Foundation’s goal is to create a place where technology that focuses on or incorporates identity can come to be poked, prodded and dissected by identity experts in order to prove its resiliency and true worth. So far, Google has donated the intellectual property for a user interface it developed called Account Chooser, a simple, open standard log-in interface for the Web. There is also a corresponding Web site maintained by the Foundation that provides a place for users to manage their identities for use with Account Chooser...