100% Open Source information cards, and how Ben might win an iPhone

I was rather surprised today to read a post by Ben Laurie where he writes that “there is no practical difference between Cardspace and Passport.” Please read the whole post to understand the context. It’s not long.

He contends that Cardspace is only supported on Microsoft systems, and that, since the identity provider and consumer are therefore the same entity, there is no privacy advantage. I think there are a number of huge and hugely invalid assumptions in that contention. A centralized service hosted by a single vendor is very different than a distributed service — even if the service components are implemented by a single vendor. But it is not true that information card systems are implemented only by Microsoft. In fact, no Microsoft code at all is needed to deploy a complete system.

Ben also makes some rather general statements about lack of support for OpenID and that it “has no consumers of note.” Hmmph. I use OpenID all the time and find it useful. I wonder what I need to do to be a consumer of note.

I’m all for bloggers getting to vent their opinions, and, in that respect, there’s a lot in the post to love. I’m also for pointing out reality, and I think pointing out real users and deployments is important. I expect that Ben is right that there are currently more enterprise deployments of SAML federations than information cards or OpenID. But I disagree that OpenID has no consumers of note, and I disagree that Microsoft controls all identity providers and consumers of information card systems.

For example, please consider this shamelessly self-serving, but complete, illustration:

Novell and the Bandit Project just launched a campaign to promote awareness of information card technologies. The campaign site consists of an identity provider which is running on OpenSUSE 10.2 and includes a Security Token Service from the Higgins project, as well as various authorization and auditing components from the Bandit project. The same domain also hosts sites running Joomla and WordPress that receive information cards using plugins from the Pamela Project. There are links provided so that users can get an identity selector for Linux, Mac, and even Windows. Most of the identity selectors are open source and developed by the Higgins and Bandit projects. We do throw in a link to a Microsoft site for those who are running Windows and need to download Cardspace. We didn’t think that would be offensive.

Ben, please check it out. You might win an iPhone. You can use information cards to access the site, or even deploy your own identity provider or consumer using 100% open source software.