More Sun 'participation' - this time with web single sign-on
According to
news reports, Sun will later today announce a further foray into open source, with the creation of the Open Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project. According to the report, OpenSSO will see Sun releasing source code from its Java System Access Manager (under the same CDDL license used for the OpenSolaris project) for web single sign-on and authentication, with the necessary integration hooks to tie it into its Java System Web Server and Java System Application Server. It will be interesting to see whether OpenSSO includes working examples of the identity management interoperability specifications
co-developed with Microsoft.
This is a smart move by Sun. First, it continues the ‘participation age’ theme promoted by COO
Jonathan Schwartz and manifested in its recent
rebranding. Second, whilst web single sign-on is valuable both in terms of simplifying the user experience and easing user administration, the real opportunity lies in user provisioning, federated identity management, auditing for compliance etc. Eric Leach, a Sun product manager is quoted as saying “"The idea is that we're going to give developers the tools they need to build basic security into their internal Web infrastructures without additional cost,". In other words, OpenSSO provides customers with a free platform for Intranet-based single sign-on from which Sun can then build with its suite of
identity management products offering higher value identity management capabilities.
Sun clearly hopes that the inclusion of off-the-shelf integration with its web and application servers will help to drive adoption. Whilst some developers may choose to experiment with these products, the majority of customers will already have made their choice (and it’s likely to be Apache, BEA, IBM, JBoss rather than Sun) and will want OpenSSO to work with that, so I think Sun is likely to be disappointed.
