This Gandhi quote was made about weightier topics than technology, but it came to my mind when following some of the recent, more heated, discussion on the promise (or dangerous perils!) of using URLs to point to people on the net, using light-weight digital identity technologies like LID. It certainly keeps rattling some nerves among people with a stake in the outcome …
When I first published about LID a little over a year ago, the bloggers took note, but the digital identity insiders largely didn’t. After the noise wouldn’t stop, though, because many bloggers realized its value, round 2 came into full swing. I particularly cherish the quote “I see LID as the unicycle … novel, but impractical and limited … like a unicycle, LID is just not a useful way to get around”. Other members of the establishment picked that quote up (google it to find out), but well, it didn’t dissuade anybody.
The third round seems to have been rung in just over a month ago. During the second Gillmor Gang’s Identity Podcast, so much disagreement was aired about URL-based identity, that a couple of weeks later Kim Cameron (Microsoft’s Chief Identity architect, and responsible for InfoCard, a non-URL based identity technology bundled with Windows Vista) agreed to a separate 45-min interview with Craig Burton (analyst with and head of the Burton Group) and Aldo Castañeda, to, as Aldo put it:
“delve … deeply into the issues around URL-based identity systems and the notion that they extend into all kinds of different areas and perhaps even provide the overall solution for digital identity systems.”
Obviously, Aldo did not expect Kim to agree when he framed it this way! As I write this, I just finished another of Aldo’s interviews; his goal was (and I thank him for that!) to give me an opportunity to respond. I will post a link when he’s posted the recording on-line; my first, earlier interview with him is here.
Others are chiming in, too. Unfortunately the Identity Gang mailing list remains invitation-only, but boy, tempers have been flaring this past week! When technical discussion suddenly turns emotional, you know you have hit a nerve with your technology! (I’d also like to acknowledge Six Apart, the XRI/XDI folks and many others, some of whom are listed here, who are all working together with us at NetMesh on this URL-based approach.)
One public post on this topic is from Michael Graves (CTO at Verisign) He takes issue with some of Kim Cameron’s (of Microsoft) assertions about what URL-based identities cannot do. His is an extensive post, and I encourage you to read it.
Where does this leave us? On current indications, I guess we URL folks need to prepare for a full-fledged fight. Personally, I’d much rather see us (all! not just the URL-based folks) deliver more value and innovative applications to our users, and spend our energy integrating with each other instead of insisting on stovepipes and one’s own One True Way™ of doing identity, while everybody else, like us URL-based folks, is so wrong.
By the way, my open invitation stands: at NetMesh, (and I’m sure that applies to most other companies in the URL-based camp, and probably YADIS as a whole) we are willing to work with anybody who wants to make their identity technology interoperate with ours out of the box. We work under the Bill Joy assumption that most smart people do not work for us, and I’m sure there are lots of problems many people have solved already that we haven’t even thought of! If we all get our stuff together and really make our technologies interoperate, instead of just talking about grand visions and why those others are wrong, we could actually deliver more value to our users than any single one of us could! What a concept. That’s of course why we helped create YADIS in the first place as the open space that it is for everybody, both organizationally and technically.
Why should leveraging everybody’s brains, like in any open-source project, not apply to identity?
End of rant. (Sorry)
But then, you know how the Gandhi quote ends …