Chris:
 
Just as a point on the curve JOID is also actively being maintained by us:  
http://code.google.com/p/joid/
 
Gary.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Chris Messina
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2011 9:59 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] Ongoing maintenance of the OpenID libraries


I'm reflecting both a general sense that I have about the libraries, as well as 
analysis from Will Norris — one of the few consistent contributors to various 
OpenID libraries/implementations (i.e. the WordPress OpenID plugin). 

Since I also maintain the list of OAuth libraries on the OAuth site, in 
contrast, I've seen much more activity with and interest in those libraries 
over the past year or so.

Dick may have a point that people have lost interest. I can't draw the same 
conclusion about the product that we're shipping, since third-party 
authentication has only become more common in the past year. Instead, it seems 
to me that there's probably an impression that the "project is dead" or that 
the core of the community has moved on to OAuth, since the capabilities that 
OAuth unlock are generally more interesting to people (and more relevant, given 
the various industry adoptions). While OAuth (1 or 2) doesn't solve all the 
most interesting problems, it solves the ones that people can get their heads 
around today, and that confront them immediately when trying to access user 
data or facilitate sign in.

Furthermore, without the community or the foundation taking a more active role 
in the development, improvement, and simplification of the libraries (or 
relying on Janrain, which gave up maintaining the libraries a long time ago), 
that responsibility has simply gone unserved. 

I appreciate John's point about openID4java being maintained — as part of 
another organization's toolkit, it makes sense that it would be maintained. 
What I'm worried about are all the libraries that fall under our purview and 
that are no longer being actively maintained.


Chris


On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 8:47 AM, Eric Sachs < [email protected]> wrote:


I certainly wouldn't mind if the libraries were organized better, however when 
we pole our current/targetted RPs about areas for improvement for the OpenID 
scenarios we support, the state of the libraries doesn't make it to the top 10 
list.  The only exception is RPs who are trying to do both OpenID+OAuth and who 
not surprisingly complain about the OAuth1 signing issues. 

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Chris Messina < [email protected]> wrote:


It has come to my attention that the maintenance of the OpenID libraries has 
fallen by the wayside in the past year. Since OpenID 2.0 is still the de facto 
latest version, I believe it is up to the foundation to make sure that we're 
keeping the existing libraries up to date. 

Specifically, since our code is hosted on GitHub, there have been several forks 
and subsequent pull requests posted to the PHP library:


https://github.com/openid/php-openid

 <https://github.com/openid/php-openid> Will Norris is reviewing these changes 
but I think this raises an important issue that we've neglected for some time — 
making the developer experience of integrating OpenID (beyond using an 
off-the-shelf solution like Janrain Engage) adequate. To that end, making sure 
that the libraries are open for improvements, and that we respond to pull 
requests in a timely fashion should be something that we prioritize in 2011.

If it's unclear who the current maintainers or owners are for the libraries, 
that's something we should absolutely address.

Chris

-- 
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate, Google


Website: http://chrismessina.me
Blog:  http://chrismessina.me/b
Follow my updates: http://twitter.com/chrismessina 


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-- 
Chris Messina
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Website: http://chrismessina.me
Blog:  http://chrismessina.me/b
Follow my updates: http://twitter.com/chrismessina 


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