OAuth, the “valet key for the Web,” has just rolled out a “Non-Assertion Covenant and Author’s Contribution License,” which should accelerate adoption of this important open-spec building block, especially by risk-averse large companies. In short, the new license, which according to one of the specs authors, Eran Hammer-LaHav, has been signed by AOL, Citizen Agency, Google, Ma.gnolia, Pownce, Six Apart, Twitter, Wesabe, Yahoo!, and the individual contributors, makes clear that the various contributors to the spec will not sue the companies or individuals who roll out implementations of the spec into shipping products and services.
This is great news for the opening up of the Social Web, and should pave the way for other projects under development, such as Portable Contacts.
Those interested in the details will find them here:
This specification is made available under the OAuth Non-Assertion Covenant and Author’s Contribution License For OAuth Specification 1.0 available at http://oauth.net/license/core/1.0. Copyrights are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution –ShareAlike 3.0 license available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0.
Here’s some good coverage from David Chartier at ars technica.
We (Joseph Smarr, David Recordon, Chris Messina, and I) discussed this news and did a deep dive on OAuth on this week’s episode of The Social Web TV, which will air tomorrow.
The Real McCrea 