Announcing OSIS: a “Historic Development” (ZDNet)

With the title "OSIS links Internet identity systems", Phil Windley reports from the Harvard/Berkman Identity Mashup Conference this week in on ZDNet. On the subject of our announcement of OSIS, he says:

OSIS is more than just a small project to build open source identity selectors for Microsoft’s CardSpace (formerly InfoCard); after all, that’s been done. OSIS will support interoperability between the addressable identity systems (OpenID, LID, XRI) and card (or token) based identity systems (more notably CardSpace and Higgins). OSIS has the support of all of the major players (including Microsoft, Novell, IBM, SXIP, XRI, and Verisign).

This is really a historic development in the Internet identity space. Microsoft, before their own implementation of CardSpace even ships, is linking up with the larger identity community, including OpenID, LID, i-Names, and Higgins. Make no mistake, they’ve been participating and giving leadership to that community for a long time, but until now, it wasn’t clear that all the various systems would be interoperable. OSIS aims to change that.

In my view, this is the first very solid sign that the so-far randomly grown user-controlled digital identity space is coming together into shared architecture that everybody contributes to; and as a result, this allows major investment by businesses because business risk has been reduced tremendously: if everybody — allies and competitors — are building around the same architecture, by definition, nobody takes the risk of investing in the wrong architecture. It’s great that we at NetMesh had an opportunity (and a bunch of hard work, admittedly) in making this happen.

Jamie Lewis (CEO of the Burton Group) just said:

Last week [at the Catalyst conference], OSIS seemed like an idea; this week it has structure.

I will write about this more … for now, both the announcement and the reception of it has been absolutely great. Thanks, guys!

Bonus: A picture of me (all the way to the right) doing the announcement, with representatives from Microsoft, Novell, Higgins, Cordance, Verisign and Sxip behind following with brief messages of support.