Seems that Tim Bray is calling on Microsoft to get of the WS- spec bandwagon and join the Liberty Alliance. Or at least that is the case in the world of single sign-on.

I've wondered about this on and off for a while. Basically, I wonder about it when Liberty is in the news announcing some new spec update or new member company. I tend to forget about it any other time since it never comes up in conversations I typically have with customers. Yes, single sign-on does, but that tends to be more an infrastructure dude thing than a developer thing so single sign-on is often referred to as "what they are working on" tones. Added to that that Liberty stuff is even less mentioned and you can start to see why I don't think of it much. That and it is a boring topic IMHO. Complex to get right, but boring to understand.

But back to Liberty. It's rather obvious, despite spin efforts to the contrary, that Passport has been a total failure outside of Microsoft's own properties. I think Microsoft Identity Management products are doing ok (again, I don't really follow it). So should Microsoft join? I think we should. What could it hurt? We would basically be providing another extension to the Microsoft platform. We make it cheap. We make Active Directory a great place to store your identities. We make .NET a great way to leverage Liberty (or any other kind) of identity. If we really believe in interoperability over cross-platform, then this seems like a great way to extend the value proposition of Windows.

Of course, I don't follow this so perhaps there is some killer reason beyond "Not Invented Here". Don't know.