Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

Out-Law News

HP joins Liberty Alliance, Microsoft might follow


The Liberty Alliance Project today announced the addition of seven major companies as founding members and members of the management board. The Alliance was launched by Sun Microsystems and others to compete against Microsoft’s Passport for control of network sign-on identity standards via any web enabled device. The Alliance is promoting open, rather than proprietary, standards.

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.

We are processing your request. \n Thank you for your patience. An error occurred. This could be due to inactivity on the page - please try again.