OpenID and Good Citizenship

Hey! So I’ll just blurt it out: we’ve joined the OpenID Foundation! But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.

Last week, we announced that SourceForge.net is now supporting OpenID for logins. Well, people seem to be using it, and things are going very smoothly. In the past week, we’ve had over 1,200 users who have associated their accounts with OpenID identities, with very few support issues logged.

We had no major hiccups during our rollout, and we’re already planning our next batch of the improvements you’re asking for (which, incidentally, include support for Yadis/XRDS and a new approach towards SVN/CVS/shell passwords.) All in all, it’s been just about the smoothest implementation I can remember.

I’m really happy that people are using it, but I’m not necessarily surprised – especially since it was one of the most requested features in our Suggestion Box! That, along with the various attention we received in the blogosphere, really underscores the importance of OpenID in our modern, open Internet.

The way I see it, SourceForge has a responsibility to our community to support the growth of open technologies and frameworks like OpenID. To that end, we’ve been contributing parts of our OpenID work to the Zend Framework.

Which brings me back to where I started: SourceForge has just joined the OpenID Foundation! We look forward to promoting OpenID in interesting and creative ways in the years to come. OpenID, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.