The long-tailed Tasmanian mouse is out of the bag

You know, even before considering its merits (and they are many): I’ve always *LOVED* the sheer fact that the Higgins project exists.
Higgins in the tangible proof that all this user centered identity talking truly is a movement that touches everyone. You have no idea of how many times, during the many briefings I gave on CardSpace and the IdM in the last 2+ years, somebody in the audience invariably rose to say “Hey, this is all fine and dandy, but you’re Microsoft: what guarantees do I have that this stuff won’t lock me in?”. That is usually the point in which I get ROI for the monstrous amount of money I spend with my dentist, because I can’t help but smile as I go on telling the tale of this amazing project. People from SocialPhysics, IBM, Novell, ooTao, Parity… working on supporting multiple aspects of identity management, from the selector itself to RP & IP components, supporting multiple platforms, and happily interoperating (for real!) with CardSpace; icing on the cake, all released under the Eclipse Foundation Software User Agreement! That never failed to defuse the question, of course.

With time the momentum grew, and now I can even point people to the big interop matrix that OSIS publishes after every event (Mike, thank you for having picked a short & easy to remember URI for your blog; that’s how I usually get to the wiki); for what I remember Higgins was the first OSS effort I’ve heard of, and it occupies many columns in those matrixes :-).

So, dear Paul & Higgins team, congratulations for your 1.0 release: I hope it will be the first of many, and I am looking forward to have the time to play with it. Congratulations, and thank you 😉 you know, I sort of have a long tail too…