Sun responds to Mundie's Liberty slur
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The Liberty Alliance, a federation of over 30 of the world's largest companies working together to establish Web authentication based on open standards, came under fire when Mundie described the decision to form such an alliance as "unfortunate." According to Mundie, the Alliance's stated purpose was pointless because Microsoft had already made single sign-in a reality through Passport.
However, Stern pointed out the despite its capacity to record profiles and preferences, the Passport database fails to represent purchasing power due to the level of duplication between different Microsoft interfaces.
"If I sign up to Hotmail, forget my password and sign in again, I am suddenly two people according to Microsoft," Stern said smilingly. "Liberty is not about making another wallet where the information belongs to a specific company, it is about establishing ways to transfer information between members."
Stern went on to comment favorably on the Microsoft's decision to federate the latest version of Passport; however, he said problems regarding information duplication were still an issue.
Stern also revealed the extent of mistrust that exists below the forced civility surrounding Web services standards.
"We agree on the interfaces, we agree on using XML, Microsoft says build it in Visual Basic or C#, and everyone else says build it in Java," Stern said. "At this stage things appear to be progressing, but there is nothing to stop subtle changes being made to the technology by one of the parties in an attempt to take more of the market for themselves."
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