OpenID Foundation Scores Top-Shelf Board Members

If the OpenID Foundation were a liquor cabinet, it just got stocked with
some Grey Goose, Rhum Clement, and Gran Patron. The foundation, which
is pushing for a universal Internet login standard, announced on
Thursday that representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, and
VeriSign have become its first corporate board members. They join
existing board members Scott Kveton (Vidoop), David Recordon (Six Apart),
Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity), Martin Atkins (independent), Artur Bergman
(Wikia), Johannes Ernst (NetMesh), Drummond Reed (Parity Communications),
and executive director Bill Washburn. According to the announcement:
"Last year, OpenID grew by leaps and bounds both as a technology and as
a community. At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million
OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used.
Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000
websites to accept them. OpenID has grown to be implemented by major
open source projects such as Drupal, cornerstone Web 2.0 services such
as those by 37signals and Six Apart, as well as a mix of large companies
including as Apple, Google, and Yahoo!. Today is about truly recognizing
the accomplishments of the entire OpenID community which has certainly
grown beyond the small grassroots community where it started in late 2005.
One of the other accomplishments of the Foundation in 2007 was working
with AOL, Microsoft, VeriSign, Sun, Symantec, and Yahoo! to develop an
intellectual property rights policy and process for technical OpenID
specification work which was finalized in December 2007. While all of
these community accomplishments have been great, each was made possible
by the community's willingness to include the resources of companies
alongside the efforts of individual contributors. By bringing on these
companies and their resources, the OpenID Foundation will now be able to
better serve the needs of the entire OpenID community."