re: No Microsoft in Liberty Alliance
Proprietary or Bust.
>> AOL Joins Liberty Alliance to Build Net Standards
Peter Henderson
Reuters
The world's largest Internet service provider, AOL, said on Tuesday it had joined Sun Microsystems Inc., Nokia and others in the Liberty Alliance of companies hammering out standards to make the Web safer and easier to use.
The AOL Time Warner Inc. unit challenged Microsoft Corp., which has dismissed Liberty and forged ahead with its own .NET program and Passport systems, to join the group which wants to let users securely log in once to shop and travel through affiliated sites.
Liberty includes a slew of major traditional and online companies, from General Motors Corp. to Cisco Systems Inc. and Sony Corp, and the alliance plans to release its first set of standards some time next year.
The intention is to build a system so that different companies could compete to store a user's data, ranging from lists of interests to credit card numbers, and provide it to participating Web and network sites in the expanding Web, including wireless phones, for instance.
For that to work well, there must be broad agreement on the standards, which makes AOL's joining significant, although critics have said the broad group founded in September may have trouble agreeing on common technological denominators.
``Because Liberty Alliance is not a centrally controlled system, AOL and other companies can continue to enhance their existing authentication and identity services and develop new services,'' American Online Chairman and Chief Executive Barry Schuler said in a statement.
AOL encouraged Microsoft to join Liberty, an AOL spokesman added. ``If they did so we think it would be a potentially significant step away from their past efforts to leverage their monopoly and control this new space,'' he added.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer poured cold water on those hopes last month when he said he thought ``the Sun thing has absolutely no probability of mattering,'' and has said others could join Microsoft's program.
Jonathan Schwartz, chief strategy officer at Sun, which competes with Microsoft with its Java Web-building language and computers that run a non-Microsoft operating system, said credit card and payment companies might consider joining the alliance, which would soon publish a road map.
Liberty intends to agree on standards rather than develop technology, which member companies already running authentication systems could tweak to bring into compliance, he said. <<
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