* Reporting from O'Reilly's Open Source Conference
I was in the Rose City last week (that’s Portland, Ore., for those unfamiliar with the nickname) for O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference. I’d hoped to escape the record heat wave in the San Francisco Bay Area by traveling north, but landed at PDX airport with the thermometer reading 97(F, 36C)! Fortunately, there were a couple of open source related identity announcements so the trip wasn’t a total loss.
The OpenID community wants to grow. With the participation and sponsorship of VeriSign, JanRain, Four Kitchen Studios, Cordance, ooTao, Zooomr, claimID, NetMesh, SXIP, Opinity, and Six Apart, OpenID is offering a “bounty” to others that want to join the community.
Well, you need to do more than simply “join” but the bounty is $5,000 and it’s available to each of the first 10 software projects that meet the conditions of the bounty. The conditions are: a) the software carries an open source license; and b) there are at least 200,000 Internet users of currently installed public instances and 5,000 downloads a month. OpenID even identifies some potential qualifiers, such as WordPress and Drupal. Full details of the bounty can be found here and info about the OpenID protocol is here.
The other announcement was a bit more ambitious – Diamelle Technologies has released what it calls the “First Open Source Identity and Access Management Suite with Service Oriented Architecture” (the caps are Diamelle’s!). Diamelle claims that its IAM suite “…utilizes a consistent, efficient, secure and cost effective approach to provide authentication, fine-grained role based access control, audit, user self service, password and policy management and user provisioning across the enterprise.”
Head to the Diamelle IAM page to learn more about the suite, although it doesn’t elaborate on the open source services/products/tools used to create it. Note that there’s also a “professional” version that (at a price, an unnamed price) offers a software maintenance agreement, support and the possibility of a professional engagement for rollout (at an even higher cost).
While the company claims to have been around since 1982, I hadn’t come across it before, so if you’ve used Diamelle’s products I’d like to hear from you. Otherwise, you might at least want to try IAM out as long as you have the hardware and time available. Who knows? It might be just what you need.
