The open source movement scored a victory last week in the battle to consolidate online user identities under a universal standard when AOL announced its support for OpenID, a non-proprietary protocol for Internet identity management. Starting immediately, millions of AOL users — and the even greater number of people with AIM instant messenger accounts — can use their AOL/AIM handle and password to login to any blog, wiki, social network, or Web site that implements the OpenID standard.

To get to the bottom of what OpenID is and what it means, NewAssignment.Net talked to Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain, an Oregon-based software firm that advocates the OpenID standard.

“It’s a solution to the one username, one login problem,” Kveton said. Rather than create a new username for any blog you want to comment on (like, say, NewAssignment.Net) , OpenID allows users to login anywhere that supports the protocol with a single ID — an ID that can now be your AIM username.

Of course, a lot of savvy Internet users already employ the features embedded in programs like Firefox 2.0 to remember the usernames and passwords of accounts they create on sites like NewAssignment.Net for them. But beyond the convenience to end-users, Kveton insists the winners are the Web sites themselves because OpenID encourages interaction with its ease of use. “The biggest driver is that sites want to get rid of the user registration process,” he said. “Users try to login, hit the registration form, and just go away. OpenID solves the problem.”

Beyond ease of use, the OpenID framework gives users control over their digital identity. By utilizing the emerging OpenID Attribute Exchange specification, users are able to decide what aspects of their identity can be shared, such as their name, address, or phone number with different sites.

OpenID was originally the brainchild of Brad Fitzpatrick, the programmer behind Livejournal, the millions-strong blogging/networking site that was in many ways a precursor to the now more popular MySpace and Facebook. When Livejournal was acquired by SixApart, the new company wanted a means by which Livejournal’s users could interact with its other blogging products: Typepad and MovableType. To solve the problem Fitzpatrick created OpenID 1.0, and since then the open source developer community has enhanced the protocol and advocated for its spread.

While OpenID attracted a lot of excitement in open source circles and had been slated for inclusion into Firefox 3.0 as a “mandatory requirement,” OpenID has been hampered by lack of widespread adoption. The entry of AOL and the millions of accounts it brings adds newfound credibility to the fledgling standard. And Microsoft, whose Windows Live ID a/k/a .NET Passport got outflanked by Google’s and Yahoo’s delivery of identity-based features (email, IM, calendar, BBS) around their own proprietary logins, announced its integration of OpenID with Windows Vista at the RSA Conference earlier this month.

With the support of both AOL and Microsoft and the millions upon millions of accounts they bring with them, OpenID is looking likely to be a major open-source success, one that could have a transformative and beneficial impact on how people use the Internet in a user-centric Web 2.0 world. Kveton is ecstatic. “It’s a completely open protocol,” he said. “No one owns it, and no one should.”

More reading: Why AOL Created 63 Million New OpenIDs.

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Eric Krangel’s work has appeared in numerous papers including the
Chicago Tribune, the Montreal Gazette, and the Minneapolis Star
Tribune.

Home hobbyists have long made a practice of hacking consumer electronics, either to add on features, attempt a home repair, or just out of curiosity. Open up your iPod or solder a mod chip onto your Xbox and you void your warranty — and the manufacturer wants nothing to do with you. Because of the illicit and unsupported nature of these changes, a veritable open source movement has developed on the Web to share advice on how to tinker and improve home electronics. It has spawned some of the most popular and interesting blogs on the Internet, so why aren’t companies able to see the benefit in opening up the insides of their gadgets to consumers?

But unlike Microsoft and Apple, who frown on amateur engineers using their products as a chassis for something bigger and better, iRobot, developer of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, is embracing the open source robotics movement.

As the ideals of the open source movement inspire collaborative thinking and challenge top-down hierarchies, more religious groups are putting up Web sites and declaring themselves an “open source religion.” Jews are by no means the only religious group to experiment with open source methodologies, as NewAssignment.Net reported last week.

Take Yoism, an open source religion founded by Boston-area psychologist Dan Kriegman in 1997. Growing up a Jew trying to make sense of the monstrous evil of the Holocaust, Kriegman dedicated his Ph.D. to trying to understand what draws people towards religious ideologies.

“Having a religious identity is the norm, not the exception,” Kriegman said. “It provides essential things, a sense of belonging and higher purpose.” But there’s a dark side. “It knits together a group and prepares them to commit genocide, or defend against it…What we need is a religious belief system that provides all the good things without the crazy stuff,” Kriegman said.

Kriegman’s son Isaac, a Linux programmer, encouraged him to start his own religion — and to make it open source. “Almost every single thing can be changed,” Kreigman said. “We believe everyone has access to a piece of the truth.” Yoism counts more than 300 members, of which 30 might congregate on any given weekend. “There’s no prayer to a God, but there’s a lot of singing.”

Likening his faith to a Linux distribution, possible changes have to be ratified by Yoism’s board of directors, people “who have been showing up and shown they’re serious,” Kriegman said. “It’s about finding the good and quashing magical thinking.”

For many Jews, raised with a strong sense of cultural identity but lacking a formal religious education, accessing the lessons and wisdom of their heritage can seem daunting. The essential texts of Judaism, the Torah, the Midrash, the Talmud, conform to stylistic conventions thousands of years old that make the texts frustrating, if not impossible, to decipher for the casual reader.

But the Internet has enabled people to offer their own commentary on religious texts, building a new collective wisdom — an open source approach to religion.

For the past seven months, Slate.com editor David Plotz has been leading the “idiosyncratic” Blogging the Bible project. “This is a book which shaped my life, the religion I believe in, but I’ve never read it for myself,” Plotz told NewAssignment.Net. Calling himself a “not very observant Jew,” Plotz started with chapters of Genesis, reading the text for the first time as an adult. He then summarizes the passage online, adds his own personal thoughts and observations, and invites his readers to respond.

“The response has been overwhelming,” Plotz said. “Every time I put something up, I get this flood of e-mails about it.”

Designing a car from scratch has long been an amusing mental exercise for automotive hobbyists, or a quirky team project for undergraduate engineers at places like MIT or the University of Pennsylvania. But, Germany’s Markus Merz wants to go farther, he’s the brains behind the OScar project, a vastly ambitious plan to design and build automobiles using open-design principles.

“I believe in the basic need of the individual for mobility, but not the way the automobile industry is fulfilling that need from an environmental point of view,” Merz told NewAssignment.Net. “There is space for innovation in this field.”

For Merz, the process of collaborative design for aluminum and rubber is no different than for Linux and Firefox. Or, as Merz would have it, “hardware” over “software.”

“It’s about being modular without having too many modules,” Merz said. He’s broken down OScar’s design to six such modules: Board (the drivetrain), Body (chassis), Engines, Power, Safety, and Information Systems. Once the coupling points are agreed upon, design for each module can run independently. And as a bonus, a modular design allows the theoretical OScar driver to swap parts as needed, easily changing a passenger car to a pick-up truck.