Will X.500 become fashionable again? That is what I am wondering after reading Dave Kearn's article "How a universal directory might work. A worldwide, distributed, replicated virtualized directory system would be useful for provisioning across boundaries."
My stomach turned over as I read the article. Not because there's anything wrong with the story or Dave's comments but because I started my career in this field just at the height of the X.500 craze when it was the buzzword of the day. Do you support X.500? Is your product an X.500 directory? Is your X.500 product interoperable? Do you support the DSP protocol? Will you be at EMA interoperability challenge showing your product? Sound familiar? (Just swap out X.500 for "XACML" or "SAML" or "SPML" and you'll know where I am coming from. Or, will we be swapping in "WWDS" soon?)
I never kept my wide ties, bell-bottom jeans and velour clothing from those days. I threw it all out despite. I hoped that style would never come back then and I still hope not now. I feel exactly the same about X.500 or anything that looks, smells and walks the same even if it is called a "Worldwide Directory Service".
Please, please, stop the bus. I gotta get off. I think I'm gonna puke...
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Dave Kearns, identity management, X.500, federation
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1 comment:
There is an argument to made that distributed directories and features like tree sharing ('transparency' in OpenLDAP terms) are needed to facilitate access controls across multiple logical domains, but it is probably a good idea to keep the scope of the challenge in mind.
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