OpenID is a great IDea but like other decentralised non-owned protocols it is subject to fragmentation and possibly incompatibility with itself.

I'd love some one with a bit more information on the subject to post a comment regarding this.

I predict that there will be a few centralized OPs and a handful of reference RP libraries, so everything will just work.

Don;t get me wrong, I think OpenID is a fabulous idea in theory. I just don;t want to see companies and organizations embrace it and then tweak it to attempt to "own" there version (i'm looking at companies like Microsoft here) with non-standard fluff hence making the concept useless, ya know? Are my fears unfounded?

Considering big players like Microsoft and AOL are embracing the technology, it is only a matter of time before others join it too.

Microsoft's hopes that OpenID will embrace their CardSpace "standard" I'm sure it will be added and it will be a choice of people to use it or not. Much like you can use IE only tags and filters within HTML and only certain browsers (IE) will read it and everybody else ignores it.

It has the industry support and it has the developer support. It would take a horrible cataclysm to derail OpenID adoption right now.

It's so simple, I don't see how it can get screwed up. Most of the complicated parts (authentication, etc) are somebody else's problem, from OpenID's perspective. I've only read enough about it to be dangerous, though.

But isn't OpenID hitting a bit close to home regarding Microsofts "Passport" attempt. I mean it failed...miserably. And in a sense, OpenID is the same as Microsoft's "Passport" only they do not own or control it. I'm just a bit worried that Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy is still a strategy for them.

It looks like they've been co-operating on the ID problem for a while now with Sxip and JanRain, so I'm cautiously optimistic. Microsoft's ability to extinguish things is diminishing daily.