The ever-trenchant-if-occasionally-inebriated "cfb" <cfb@nirai.ne.jp> says,
regarding the Liberty Alliance
> http://www.projectliberty.org
[cfb]
"DoCoMo was a natural inclusion....My primary difficult with the
Liberty Alliance [...] is that it is described as a "federation" and
plans to establish a "federated identity"... almost identity by
consensus if you will. Still, the key concept of federation is that
power is distributed between (but primarily surrendered to) a
central authority and a number of units with residual powers."
You're applying a chillingly logical definition, with a rock-solid
historical and politico-theoretical lineage, to an industry populated
with marketers who will natter all day and most of the night about
"joining our business ecosystem", who never metaphor they
didn't mix, who always...
...oh...hey....I'm starting to rant, too.
Funny how that works.
[cfb]
"I'm curious who the "central authority" is going to be [....]
Whoever has the most money? The most information?
The strongest web of trust? Inquiring minds want to know
before they start giving up their personal info..."
[mt]
I guess for Java, there was/is always this paranoia about Sun
being that central authority. Java, however, is just a language
and a platform definition, one that Sun couldn't really even claim
to control, ultimaely. And you can use it all (Java technology)
relatively anonymously.
There's something categorically different about identification and
authentication for the masses.
Which is what makes having DoCoMo in Liberty Alliance sort
of interesting. We all trust the phone company implicitly, even if
we happen to like Scott McNealy more. We like Scott because
he shoots his mouth off so delightfully. But...didn't he once say
something like--"There is no privacy now. Deal with it, people"?
Me, I loved that. At the time. But--this guy is now a tribal
chieftain in a privacy/security standards consortium? Kinda
makes you want to crawl back in to the womb, be it ever so
chilly, of Ma Bell, RIP.
There's almost a trade-off there.
[cfb]
> The LA's pitch has been much more along the lines of "Join us and
> spend your time and money making what may or may not be the future
> in your image", while .NET's pitch seems to go along the lines of
> "Buy and code with our software and we'll let you participation our
> Big Game Plan(tm)".
[mt]
If I read the techno-cultural tea leaves right: Liberty Alliance is more
about playing to play. A stalemate is acceptable, because they'll have
had a chance to make some moves, and at least they denied victory to
the opponent. Need a precedent? Java hasn't taken over, but at least
Visual Basic *hasn't* taken over.
Microsoft/.NET is about playing to win.
DoCoMo might be play-to-win domestically, but it remains to be
seen which style it will bring to its exported iniatives. The 503i series
planted DoCoMo's flag pretty solidly in a camp that is also well-
represented in LA. DoCoMo did this by adopting Java as a language
and, perhaps more important, a virtual machine spec, and an API
that didn't diverge too much from standards. But they did, however,
diverge. And their beachhead in America -- AT&T Cellular -- was
originally McCaw Cellular. Craig McCaw being an old classmate
of none other than Bill Gates.
If it's The (Silicon Valley) Federation vs. The (Seattle/Microsoft) Empire,
I'd say DoCoMo has a foot in both camps.
> ....And still, what both efforts propose to do
> is solve basic security problems (and I'm not even talking computer
> or network security here). Given Microsoft's past performance
> this is right out... Federations, in my option, always introduced
> more security problems than the solve (in fact, on might argue that
> the purpose of a Federation is to create security problems to chase).
Who was it who said "those who demand perfect liberty and perfect
security deserve neither"?
Federations aren't about security for everybody. They are about
balancing freedom from central-power abuses with the safety-in-numbers
security of banding together. As metaphors go, this isn't the worst one
LA could have chosen. Since it's already about security, it's smart they
they built "liberty" into their name.
[cfb]
> Personally, I won't take either seriously until we start to see
[very plausible list of indicators, deleted]
I'd say it all comes down to how Visa goes on this one (Mastercard
and American Express are already signed up to Liberty Alliance.)
Interesting that they have a bank a charter member. But it's Bank of
America--whose home base is less than an hour's drive from Sun's and
Oracle's, pretty much a California operation despite its name. Get
Citibank in there, you've really got something.
You probably also want one of the telcos that has credit-card-
authorization accounts. I think one of those is WorldCom,
which absorbed MCI, which absorbed Tymnet, which used to
do much, if not most, of that. I don't see WorldCom on the
charter member list, though.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
Received on Fri Dec 21 05:24:39 2001