Burton Group TIps Off IBM Scientist About Microsoft AD Patent Violation

I was taken back by an article I read today about a former IBM scientist, William Reid, who claims that he created the "technology" behind Active Directory, and that he owns the patent behind it.

OK...so what's the next logical step for Mr. Reid?!

Of course...sue Haliburton! And not for the obvious reasons Haliburton should be sued...but because their Identity Management system is based on it. Pretty interesting logic there, Bill! Using that logic, you could sue almost every company out there...go sue GM and Charles Schwab while you're at it. Too late...he already did.

The most bizarre aspect of the story, is that he got the 'tip' from Catalyst!

In an interview, Reid, who says he worked on artificial intelligence for IBM from 2000 to 2002, says he determined that GM, Schwab, and Halliburton were violating his patent after visiting a trade show. Reid says he watched presentations by IT officials from the companies while attending the Burton Group's Catalyst conference.

There's nothing quite like a disgruntled, clueless IBM scientist. (No offense to the happy IBM scientsts out there.)

Oracle's Donation

Earlier this month, Oracle announced that it would hand over the Identity Governance Framework (IGF) to Liberty Alliance. IGF is an interesting framework that is composed of CARML, AAPML, an API and an identity attribute service. This is the very high level of what I understand...

CARML (client attribute req. markup language) is an xml style doc that a developer would write that lets others know about the 'data needs' of their app, for example, my app needs attibutes A, B and C. (A good usage of carml doc is for identity services, which can tell apps what info it could give them)
AAPML (attribute authority policy markup language) on the other hand is a doc that goes with the data sources. These data sources can define how place constraints on how its data is to be used. Its a profile of XACML 2.0, and can be used by a policy enforcement point (pep) to do its job, (although it has an added feature of requiring the pep to check if user consent has been obtained).
IGF also comes with specs for an client api.

What was really cool is the industry's appreciation of Oracle's move:

"We're very pleased to see that Oracle has submitted the Identity Governance Framework to the Liberty Alliance," said Don Bowen, director of Identity Integration for Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Sun believes Liberty is well suited because of its business and technical experts from all verticals, including government. Its work in the area of data privacy is not only valuable, but essential."
— Sun Microsystems, Inc., Don Bowen, director of Identity Integration

"Novell welcomes Oracle's contribution to the Liberty Alliance. We continue to look forward to working with Oracle and the other leaders in the identity management market in the development of an open identity framework."
— Novell, Inc., Nikols, vice president, Product Management Identity and Security

"CA is supporting the Identity Governance Framework to help customers more easily protect personal data across their disparate systems and applications," said Andy Rappaport, Architect, Identity and Access Management at CA. "We look forward to working with the Liberty Alliance, Oracle and others to develop practical, adaptable XML-based specifications that simplify the creation, enforcement and management of identity security policies."
— CA, Andy Rappaport, Architect, Identity and Access

It's great when everyone can play nice.

The Effects of Drugs on Spiderwebs

On Justifications

"We fly 30 million people a year. Ten thousand were affected by this."

- David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue

On Innovation

“Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it’s ever been done before."

-David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue

I'm a sucker for VCRs

T-Mobile AMEO, please come to America.