Sun announced that every Sun employee now has an OpenID from openid.sun.com. It is running OpenSSO which had OpenID support added by a fellow Canadian, Paul Bryan (a Sun contractor). An interesting move by one of the leading vendors of Federation technology. Tim Bray, now of Sun points out some of the advantages of user-centric identity. Scott Kveton, Johaness Ernst, and David Recorden all blogged about it. I really another Canadian’s response. Paul Madsen’s offered $5 CDN for one of the following identifiers:

- MyOtherUriIsASamlAssertion.sun.com
- ScottMcNealy.sun.com
- YouCanTrustMeCuzImFrom.sun.com

Can you tell that Paul is part of the Liberty Mafia?!?

The press release describes Sun’s role in OpenID:

“Sun has been participating actively in the community dialogue around OpenID and related technologies, and sees great potential for OpenID’s use alongside enterprise-ready software infrastructure.”

While it is great to have another major vendor join the OpenID community, I have not seen them very active around OpenID besides telling the OpenID community that SAML does everything that OpenID does. One wonders if this is simply a reaction to Bill Gates announcement that Microsoft would support OpenID. Politics aside, this could pave the way for an industry convergence on one simple identity protocol. Details on that later!