Have you ever wondered how serious "the big guys" are about supporting OpenID in practice, instead of just talking about it as a good thing? While nothing is as convincing as shipping interoperable code, the OpenID Foundation announced this morning that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign all have not only joined the OpenID Foundation, but will serve on the foundation’s board of directors.

This is incredibly good news for OpenID, the foundation, and for OpenID, the movement. Probably the biggest news it could create, ever …

So the OpenID Foundation board of directors will look like this going forward:

• Martin Atkins, community member (independent)
• Artur Bergman, community member (Wikia)
• Johannes Ernst, community member (NetMesh) and yours truly
• Dick Hardt, community member (Sxip)
• Mike Jones, corporate member (Microsoft)
• Gary Krall, corporate member (VeriSign)
• Scott Kveton, community member (now with Vidoop)
• Tony Nadalin, corporate member (IBM)
• David Recordon, community member (Six Apart)
• Drummond Reed, community member (Cordance, Parity)
• Bill Washburn, executive director, OpenID Foundation
• N.N., corporate member (Google)
• N.N., corporate member (Yahoo!)

Note that there are more community members than there are corporate members, which should help keep the board firmly in tune with the community.

As you might suspect, this announcement was in the works for a long time; I’m afraid it was the better part of a year. (Whenever has anybody managed to get 5 giants do anything at the same time?). I’d like to particularly thank Scott, David and Bill, who worked at this for a long time.

Admittedly it is still a bit hard for me to believe that what is arguably many of the technology’s leading companies are getting behind OpenID. What a little URL can do …