Liberty Alliance

The Liberty Alliance was formed in September 2001 by approximately 30 organizations to establish open standards, guidelines and best practices for identity management. It was originally conceived and named by Jeff Veis, a Sr. Director at Sun Microsystems based in Menlo Park, California. The initiative's goal, which was personally sponsored by Scott McNealy, Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of Sun Micosystems, was to unify a critical mass of technology, commercial and government organizations to create a viable, open standard for federated, identity-based Internet applications as an alternative to emerging, proprietary solutions appearing in the marketplace that were controlled by a single entity such as Microsoft's Passport and HailStorm web services initiative. Today it has a global membership of more than 150 organizations, including technology vendors, consumer-facing companies, educational organizations and governments from around the world, as well as hundreds of additional organizations that participate in Liberty's various open community Special Interest Groups (SIGs). It has released Frameworks that address Federation (since contributed to OASIS for the SAML standard), Identity Assurance, Identity Governance, and Identity Web Services, as various services applications. It has also been active in privacy and policy issues relative to identity.

As of 2006, the Liberty Alliance has tracked well over one billion Liberty-enabled identities and devices in fields as diverse as defense & law enforcement to telecommunications to egovernment. Management Board members include AOL, British Telecom, Computer Associates (CA), Fidelity Investments, Intel, Internet Society (ISOC), Novell, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems.

As of June 2009, the work of the Liberty Alliance is transitioning to the Kantara Initiative.