Free Software Linux

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of online identity management: what it means to have an identity online, what stays consistent with the offline world, what becomes more fluid, and what becomes more fixed. It’s a very vibrant space right now, with commercial vendors, open source projects, trends, and standards all vying for attention. I’m thinking here of a couple of overlapping categories:

The Data Portability Group appears to be trying to regain some renewed community respect by announcing its list of Steering Group Officers. Will it be enough or do we still need to see some real "deliverables" before the respect is regained?

At OSCON yesterday Dave Recordon, of Six Apart, announced a new nonprofit organization. The Open Web Foundation has been created to support the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies. According to their website, "the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."

This morning David Recordon formally announced the Open Web Foundation in a morning keynote at OSCON. (The shorter url openweb.org will come at somepoint). The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page: Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.