By: Incubus
From the Album: Light Grenades
I like it when good things happen. Especially when those good things are related to Open Source and Open Standards, so I have to give a few shoutouts this morning. One blog post at a time. People are giving us reasons to be proud.
First up today: AOL
That's right! AOL might no longer be the laughing stock of everyone who has owned a computer since the 80's. Seriously though, AOL has the potential to be the world's largest identity providers. They have over 63 Million user accounts and have been working on implementing OpenID. I actually did my first OpenID login using AOL as a provider when I had to
log into Oreilly's site for OSCON 2008 to submit my abstract for the call for papers. It was really neat and it worked flawlessly. I give AOL a lot of respect for working on this and will gladly use them as my provider from now on. Unless Fedora ever becomes a provider that is. You can find more info about AOL and their OpenID efforts here.
Now in case that wasn't exciting enough for you, the bombshell came this morning. AIM is going Jabber! I was absolutely delighted when I read this. AOL is making positive steps to finally move on and up from their decade long commitment to being as proprietary as possible and pissing of numerous people to actually opening up, embracing the age of open standards and trying to regain some mind share and build community. AOL must have hired the right hackers along the way...
This along with the MySQL deal this week serves as a tremendous validation of the open source/open standards model to those who don't know any better. We're winning!
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi
But I didn't need to just say that, because we've known all along! It's just a matter of time.
