The seven new members are: American Express, AOL Time Warner,
France Telecom, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, MasterCard
International and an unnamed “major” commercial bank. The other
founders of the Alliance and members of the management board are:
Sun Microsystems, Bell Canada, Global Crossing, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo,
Openwave Systems, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sony Corporation,
United Airlines and Vodafone.
Eric Dean, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board,
said:
"The Alliance is rapidly moving forward to
develop a commercially-viable, open, ubiquitous standard for
network identity, authentication and authorisation across a
multitude of business systems and consumer products touched by the
internet - from cellular phones to web browsers and
automobiles."
Dean also said that the Alliance is trying to bring Microsoft on
board. According to ZDNet, the Alliance is not building a system,
rather it is building a blueprint for passing data. So Microsoft
could, in theory, keep its Passport system and still join the
Alliance. According to Computer Weekly, Microsoft is interested. A
spokesman told the magazine, “There are a few issues that we would
have to work out before joining.”
In addition to the founding members, other companies that have
expressed their intent to participate in the Alliance include:
American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America,
Cisco Systems, eBay, and Verisign.
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