Yesterday, September 30, 2008, Sun Microsystems officially unveiled OpenSSO Enterprise, Sun’s “Next-Generation Access Management, Federation and Secure Web Services Solution.”

Over three years ago, way back on July 13, 2005, just two months after I wrote my first post on this blog, Sun announced at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference “plans to open source its web site authentication and web single sign-on (SSO) technologies through the Open Source Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project.”  I gave the announcement only one sentence of coverage: “Open SSO will provide source code for basic identity services including Authentication, Single-domain SSO, and Web and J2EE agents.”

Yesterday’s announcement was, in a way, a celebration of that early foray into the world of open source.  What began as a virtual toe-dip led to complete immersion in open source waters.  OpenSSO Enterprise is a result of putting Sun putting its entire access and federation management code base into the open source domain, providing a transparent and progressive forum for collaborative development.  The innovations apparent in this newly released product owe much to the many external contributors to the OpenSSO project.

It is exciting to see the fruits of Sun’s open source strategy unfold.

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