In a recent post that clarified that a Java RP is covered in my book, Roger responded "Could you talk more about the characteristics of Java RP and all the open source out there?"
One of the most pleasant things about writing this book is that everyone realized that identity on the net was a problem, the metasystem was a sound approach, and we could all work together - even if our implementations were done on different platforms and in different languages. People just want to solve the problem, and help educate people on how to solve it.
One of the areas where I see the biggest opportunity is helping everyday web developers easily become relying parties. Another is showing those same web developers how information cards can be used for much more than just logging in, particularly for personalization. There are great Java RP's out there, just as there are great RPs in .NET, PHP, and Ruby. I talk alot about them in the book.
So when a question like this comes up, the question is, do I post the book content online (to answer the question) or do I suggest someone buy the book? One thing that I've been toying with is talking with the publisher about potentially open-sourcing the open source related chapters of the book. The thought was that the open source chapters could be introduced in a wiki-style environment and the community could make sure that new projects were identified, updates in projects, etc. When developing the book, that is the chapter that was re-written the most as there were a number of changes between last March and this year.
Before I talk to my publisher, I'm interested in your feedback on two questions:
(a) Do you think folks in the open source community would still buy the book?
(b) Do you think folks in the open source community would participate?
