Scott Kveton announced the OpenID Code Bounty at OSCON today:

Integrate OpenID into your open source project and we’ll give $5,000 to your project.

We’ve seen OpenID really start to gain some momentum over the past couple of months and this Bounty program is really the exclamation point on that. There is a great list of sponsors for the program that includes people, organizations and businesses focused on building a simple, light-weight and decentralized user-centric identity platform around OpenID. Working with all of these people over the last couple of weeks has proven to me that convergence is really happening around OpenID.

I wasn't really a fan of the "original" OpenID spec. That is, it worked great, but only solved single sign-on. Then the Simple Registration Protocol, or SRP, got kludged in. This supports only 9 -- and exactly 9 -- attributes, and is not extensible. So, colour me firmly in the SXIP camp at this point.

Now, SXIP is helping to fund the OpenID bounties, and OpenID is further evolving. There is a 5th draft of OpenID 2.0, which still has profile information as separate, and Scott Kveton was earlier talking about OpenID v3 and convergence.

[Part of a series about some of the cool people I met at OSCON and Portland 2005 Drupal Conference]

Scott and the folks at OSL and OSDL and the Oregon based folks have been very, very good to Drupal. It was awesome to have Scott at Drupal Con Part 1 to talk about the new home of Drupal.org and to introduce us to the open source ecosystem in Oregon. I consider Scott an honourary Drupaler!