Less than two years after its launch, the OpenID standard drops names. Its board will be staffed with some of the bigger players in the industry : Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo are its first five members.

While OpenID was announced in 2006, its Foundation was only created in June 2007 with the objective to push that technology's adoption. A goal well under way with 10,000 websites using OpenID according the Foundation.

This Open Source project wants to foster a common and decentralized authentication mechanism across websites. Users can create their OpenID on any participating website, and every other OpenID-enabled site will then accept it just as if the user had created a full local account with it.

However, the user keeps some level of control since its identity is not shared but only checked by participating websites. That's unlike similar project Liberty Alliance where all participating websites automatically share all users details.

The presence of Microsoft on the board is interesting. The company had shown its support to OpenID during the Feb,2007 RSA Conference show in San Francisco, when Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) declared that "online authentication should not be harder than its real-life counterpart : showing a common ID should be enough".

This came as a surprise since Microsoft already have its own initiative called CardSpace (formerly known as InfoCard). Even Brad Fitzpatrick, LiveJournal's lead developer and OpenID mastermind, acknowledged that Microsoft's declaration was a uncommon.

But it seems that after Passport's failure - deemed too centralized and fully owned by Microsoft - the giant does not want to ride the federated identity wave alone anymore. This could spell good news for OpenID since Microsoft could very well make CardSpace (which is already deployed on Windows Vista and available to XP through an add-on) compatible with OpenID.

Such a move would mean massive immediate adoption for OpenID. And it could also benefit to Microsoft, whose CardSpace will then be better known within the general public and even get some traction within the enterprise market, where Liberty Alliance is stronger. 

Of course, the less optimistic among us might also fear that Microsoft only embraced OpenID to starve it to death by denying its Open Source nature with proprietary enhancements.