Urban Legends & Liberty 2.0

In a comment to my post about James McGovern's comments about the Liberty Alliance, Neil Macehiter points out:

Similar concerns were raised in comments to my blog post regarding Liberty 2.0 workshop and the participation of non-vendors.

Of course, the concern there were raised by the same person (James) and I liked the response from Neil:

Your comments re the participation of technology adopters in the definition of standards is well made and something we have commented on before: http://www.mwdadvisors.com/blog/2006/11/with-standards-do-we-get-what-we.html

I think you are being a little unfair on the Liberty Alliance as adopters have (and as far as I am aware continue) played a role since the founding of the project.

In the case of the Liberty 2.0 workshop, John Kemp is actually from Nokia which, in this context at least, I would argue is closer to an adopter of software rather than a purveyor.

I would add that in regards to the Liberty 2.0 workshop, this is an informational workshop talking about what Liberty is and about how the protocols and interfaces developed within Liberty's solutions apply to a Web 2.0 world. As much as I'd like to just agree with Jeff's note that, hey, we did just release ID-WSF 2.0 (and that's what the workshop is about), the workshop really is related to Web 2.0 and hence the moniker(although, as I said, the moniker was clearly a marketing decision and not a technical decision).

That said, if you look closely at the agenda items for the workshop, none of them are from vendors about vendor's products (well, other than the presentation from Mary Ruddy about the Higgins project, but that's an open source project, so I think that's a more than fine subject for the workshop and for the enterprise). The agenda is about spreading the word about what Liberty is, what Liberty protocols are, and how those protocols apply in a Web 2.0 world.

Some have raised questions about other subjects that should be discussed (such as deployments), but this isn't a deployment workshop, it's an informational workshop. Liberty has done deployment workshops where people talk about their deployments and their findings from such deployments -- I know, I've spoken at several of them about some of the work we had done at AOL. If you want to read more on adoption and deployments, take a look at the adoption area of Liberty's web site.

So, I suggest, somewhat strongly, that James join us for the workshop so he can learn about Liberty and, perhaps, see that we, as an organization, are more than open to enterprise participation -- even with the current substantial enterprise participation that we have.

Tags : identity / liberty alliance / workshop / aol / sun / enterprise