July 2007

It was in early 2000 that I joined a company called PDA Verticals that was made up of a bunch of guys I worked at Amazon with. Great company, great team, totally fun time … only one problem. I lived in Portland, OR and the office was in Kirkland, WA. This wasn’t as bad as you’d think … most of the development team was remote and so I was able to telecommute from Portland. The bummer was that I had gigs and gigs of personal music data and no laptop. Music was a part of my workflow … I could get under my headphones and just blaze away on email, code or whatever. So, when I traveled to Seattle for a few days, I was music-less.

Enter Ampache. Ampache was a web-based tool that allowed me to personally stream my music from my house to anywhere with a decent network connection. It was for personal use only (i.e. I didn’t have it available to the public, just me via username and password). It was the first open source application I had ever built and my experience building that tool was what has led me down my ‘open’ path over the last 7 years.

Ever since then I’ve been hoping to find something that mated my passion for the open web with my love of music. Last week, I was lucky enough to find exactly that. I have recently joined MyStrands as their Open Technology Lead helping them define their strategy as it relates to the ‘open web’. MyStrands mission is to help people discover new things and they have developed a unique social recommender engine over the past 3 years. They also recently raised a round of funding and are looking to expand the scope of that mission beyond just music. Hopefully I can help play a role in shaping that mission and making it happen.

I’m excited about where MyStrands is headed and we’ll be making some big announcements in the future that relate to my background and very heavily with the ‘open web’. Keep an eye on this space to learn more … :-)

The OpenID Foundation is pleased to announce today that it has awarded three code bounties, $5000 each, to Drupal, Plone and dotnetnuke. The announcement was made today during the State of Lightning Talks at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference here in Portland, OR.

The bounty program was announced last year at OSCON ‘06. The bounty is on-going with 7 more bounties to be claimed. These awards come on the heels of the creation of the OpenID Foundation which is aimed at helping fostering the work of the OpenID community.

For more information about the bounty program and how you can participate, head on over to http://iwantmyopenid.org/bounty.

All of us at the OpenID Foundation are extremely excited about seeing OpenID continue its proliferation and the projects claiming bounties this week are a clear indications that OpenID is really hitting its stride.

Tonight, David Recordon of Verisign won Google’s prestigious “Best Strategist” open source award for his work on OpenID.

I’ve known David for a little over a year and have been amazed at hist ability to help shape the technology and community that makes up OpenID (all this before the ripe old age of 21 … no congratulatory beers for you David!).

I first met David during a meeting at Six Apart (long, long ago) with he and Brad (the creator of OpenID) when we all cooked up the OpenID Bounty program. I was a newbie in the OpenID world and David was great at helping me as I found my way.

David has been tireless in his work on OpenID being “the face” of the community and spending more time on the road than anybody I’ve ever seen (c’mon, the guy is already a United uber frequent flyer) showing up at every conference you can think of across the entire globe. He has been instrumental in seeding small user communities across the globe with his passion for making OpenID the technology it has become.

David, you have a fantastic future ahead of you … congrats, the best is yet to come.

Over the past few days there have been several posts about the state of OpenID’s intellectual property. I thought I would make a quick post to point folks at some of the progress the OpenID Foundation has been making on this front and to hopefully dispel some of the FUD going around.

First of all, I should point out that corralling a projects intellectual property (IP) is a non-trivial thing to do. You have to think about all of the current and past contributors as well as have everyone come to an agreement on how that IP should be handled. This can take many different forms. In the case of OpenID, discussions have been on-going on the legal mailing list with all of the interested parties.

Today, one of the main contributors to OpenID, JanRain (full disclosure: former employer), announced their non-assertion convenant for OpenID (covering OpenID 1.1, SREG and Yadis). This is on the heels of Sun and Verisign (and here) doing the same in the past few months.

This is great news and a clear indication that we’re moving in the right direction and going to get this sorted out. Dave Kearns at NetworkWorld mentions the patents that the folks at Sxip hold. Discussions with Dick (CEO of Sxip) have always been positive and the patents that Dick and Co. have filed are, according to him, defensive in nature. Dick has been a pioneer in this space and is firmly committed to OpenID and I believe he’s going to the right thing when it comes to his IP, patents and what the community needs.

We’ll be keeping a running tally on who has committed what to the IPR discussion on the OpenID Specifications page. Progress is being made, we’re moving forward and its never as fast as we’d all like. I encourage you, if you are so inclined, to join the discussions on the legal mailing list or blog about your thoughts on this. Its entirely up to the community how we shape this policy but its absolutely critical that we do it soon.

Update: David Recordon mentions the actual progress being forged during the face-to-face meetings. Thanks David.

Next week is OSCON and there will be a few folks from the OpenID community there presenting (come see my “State of OpenID” talk on Thursday at 10:45am!). I thought I’d take a moment and give a quick update on the state of the OpenID Foundation ahead of that conference.

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) was incorporated as a 501(c)3 US non-profit on June 17th, 2007 here in the State of Oregon (my home is the temporary World Headquarters). The legal team at Ater Wynne was instrumental in getting this setup for us. Thanks David, Ernie and the rest of the people there.

The OpenID Foundation has been created to help manage all of the legal and infrastructure details that come with a large free/open/libre project. The goal of the OIDF is not to dictate the direction of the OpenID technology; the community already has that well in hand. Instead, the OIDF will be helping develop strategies around intellectual property (more later on this), trademarks, marketing and general evangelism of OpenID. As OpenID gains momentum, we’ll need certain mechanisms in place to ensure the future of the community and the technology and to keep it free from legal encumbrances.

The first motion of the OpenID Foundation board was to setup a bank account. As the Chairman of the Board, I took this on and after talking with folks on the foundations mailing list we decided to go with Bank of America because of their flexibility in working with out-of-country members and their on-line banking. We’ll use this bank account for membership dues, donations and to administer the prizes for the bounty program.

The OpenID Foundation is also lucky enough to have Bill Washburn as the acting Executive Director. Bill is working pro-bono right now and has been for the past few months helping get the foundation setup and going. Bill is a very solid guy and one that I’ll be happy to have at the healm of the OpenID Foundation once its fully going. Bill is tasked with driving membership, managing the daily business of the foundation and working to grow and promote OpenID as a technology.

I’d also like to take this chance to give a shout out to the Board of Directors that has been working tirelessly to get the foundation created:

• David Recordon (Verisign) - Vice chair
• Artur Bergman (Six Apart)
• Johannes Ernst (NetMesh)
• Martin Atkins (independent) - Secretary
• Dick Hardt (Sxip) - Treasurer
• Drummond Reed (Cordance)

If you’re going to be at OSCON next week and are interested in learning more, send me an email or look for the goofy dude with glasses and a Firefox t-shirt and we can talk more in person. If you’re interested in joining the OpenID Foundation as a company or just to learn more and you’re not going to OSCON, you can contact at Bill Washburn at bill at OIDF dot org.

Came in this morning to discover there was an Earthquake in San Francisco 4 hours earlier … how did I find out? Well Twitter of course … :-)

Clearly it was a largish quake as folks like Tantek, Kristopher and Blaine all live in downtown SFO … we even get the actual size at 4.1. Is it me or are traditional news mediums dead?! Now if only I had enough friends across the globe and an unlimited amount of time to watch their feeds I’d never need to read Google news again … haha … :-)

Update: And of course there is a stinkin’ earthquake user on Twitter too … geez. And of course Scoble breaks a story about Twitter and earthquakes long, long ago.

Update: Lots of discussion going on all over the blogosphere about this. A couple of points I’d like to make:

• Steven is the rightful owner of openid.org and is free to do with it as he pleases.
• The offer the OpenID Foundation made to Steven for openid.org still stands.
• If the intent from the start was that Steven would run an OpenID provider, the community would never have allowed openid.org to be pointed at OpenID.net as Steven had done for many months prior to his launch of an identity provider.

Up until a few weeks ago, you could go to OpenID.org (Note: I won’t be linking to this domain in this post for reasons I’ll describe below) and get to the community site around this fantastic new single sign-on technology that so many people have put so much time and effort into creating and evangelizing. OpenID is clearly the winner in the single sign-on space and with it are coming lots of users, vendors and unfortunately, people who mean to undermine the efforts of so many.

Steven Livingstone is the current owner of the domain openid.org. He had, at the request of some members of the OpenID community, pointed openid.org at openid.net so that users who went to that domain (thinking they were getting the home of the non-profit, open source project OpenID) would be happily redirected. Several of us in the community had even engaged in conversations with Steven in hopes of securing the domain for the benefit of the community and we thought we had reached a tentative agreement that included praise on the OpenID site as well as monetary remuneration. Steven disappeared for several months with the birth of a child and change of job situation (which any of us would do) only to re-emerge a few weeks ago with a brand new project: openid.org .

openid.org is now the home to an OpenID provider that Steven runs. Steven turned off the site redirection for openid.org to openid.net and as such his new site are the benefit of quite a bit of Google juice. We were quite naive to trust Steven when he pointed openid.org at openid.net; we believed he would do the right thing and help our community out by assigning the domain over to the OpenID Foundation. So all of those blog posts that people mis-typed (see this example in the first paragraph), all of those links in blogrolls that pointed at the .org were now so conveniently pointed at Steven’s new OpenID provider. As such, if you search for ‘openid’ in Google the openid.org result is now the 5th result and moving up fast.

In subsequent conversations, Steven has been quick to point out that this is a free service (and will always remain that way according to him). However, this morning I come to see that not only is he running Google ads on the site, the main landing page is beginning to look very openid.org-centric. By that I mean its starting to look like openid.org is the home of the OpenID project. There is a link off on the right hand side to the (in his words) “More details on OpenID can be found at the (unaffiliated) community site.” That’s pretty confusing and makes it sound like the real OpenID project is actually not affialited with the “official” site on openid.org. That’s stooping pretty low Steven.

Looking further, there are links for an OpenID directory and the latest news. Again, these all are very openid.org-centric and don’t give the real story. As a matter of fact, there are several (much better) directories for OpenID like the one by Thomas Huhn over at openiddirectory.com or the one by the guys at JanRain. In fact, openiddirectory.com is actually linked to from the main page of OpenID.net because as a community we recognize and promote those who are doing good work to help enable OpenID. This looks like another attempt by Steven to glean page views and Google ad revenue by confusing users wanting to learn about the real OpenID.

I fully appreciate that Steven owns this domain. He had originally thought of a distributed identity system but had not actually done the work to make it a reality. He registered the domain and had it on a parked page for quite some time. The problem I have is with his behavior after the discussions we had months ago and the Google juice he had accrued. Had I known he was going to land a provider and turn this into a revenue generator for himself I would have been much more vigilant in reminding people that its openid.net and not .org. Alas, we’re stuck with openid.org as something that Steven is going to own and exploit to his own ends. If it were me, I’d have a heck of a time sleeping at night knowing I was stepping all over others for my own personal gain.

My advice to you as a user and a member of the OpenID community? Boycot openid.org as a provider. Update your links to point at .net instead of .org. Participate in the conversations happening on openid.net, the wiki, the mailing lists. And of course, continue to make OpenID the great community and technology that it is.

I got a note from Adam over at Wikispaces this afternoon telling me they just added support for OpenID. Way to go guys! I have another logo to put on my slides for OSCON! :-)

You can read more or just head on over with your OpenID and login.