Too Much Confusion in the Federated Identity Management Space

Making the Case For Liberty

While SAML was first to market and WS-Federation has the biggest backers, it's the Liberty Alliance that may be the best bet for identity federation.

And

In the race to enable identity federation, the Liberty group is neither as nimble as SAML nor as dominant as the WS-Federation backers

These people are mighty confused. SAML is merely an XML vocabulary and not an Identity Management solution. It is just a tool to leverage in that space. Here, you might want to read this developerWorks article Debunking SAML myths and misunderstandings. Furthermore, both Liberty and WS-Federation use SAML (as does Shibboleth); they do not, in fact, compete against it.

Federated Identity is a cool, cool thing, but few "techie journalists" seem to understand it, which is too bad. People tend to think of Federated Identity as one of those "problems looking for a solution," but it is not like that at all. But, when you have journalists saying the equivalent of "TCP was on the scene first, but HTTP and SMTP are on the verge to take it over"; it really doesn't help.

I found this mass of confusion via the blog entry Standards, vendors and end users.