OpenID conquers communities
On May 8th, Ross Turk posted on the SourceForge.net community blog: Hey! So Iâll just blurt it out: weâve joined the OpenID Foundation!. As Ross confirms, OpenID use is becoming very popular, means users like the idea of decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.
In the initial announcement about the OpenID idea, SF.net stuff revealed they use OpenID implementation from Zend Framework - Open Source Software (oh yeah!) available under BSD License.
Recently, I’ve noticed that Chris brought the idea of OpenID to OSGeo year ago and setup necessary infrastructure, so OSGeo userid can be used as an openid.
I tried today to use OpenID capabilities of OSGeo User ID, but without any luck. It seems like the service has been disabled or moved without update in docs. Anyway, I hope we are going to keep it running. Hmm, it’s unclear to me if the OSGeo User ID is supposed to work as an OpenID and allow OSGeo users to authenticate to external non-OSGeo services with it, like to SourceForge.net. Is it?.
I’m wondering if it would be reasonable and beneficial the OSGeo Foundation participates in activities lead by the OpenID Foundation. What about joining the OpenID Foundation as a non-profit organization?
May 12th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
From a personal perspective, I think that would be diluting OSGeo’s focus on its core competencies.
I don’t mind OpenID (I’m running my own server) but it’s certainly not a panacea. There are some real problems with its vulnerability to phishing.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Jason, I agree with you. However, my post is supposed to be a little provoking and asking some questions. Just to learn the OSGeo opinion myself :-)
Regarding the security issues, definitely there are some or many. I’ve learned about them as well.