Brett McDowell, executive director of Liberty Alliance, is one of the founding members.

To date, the vast majority of real-world federation roll-outs have been internal or enterprise type deployments. Things like an enterprise authenticating its users out to an outsourced provider (such as a Fidelity 401K, or AOL's Radio Service). Yes there are many exceptions to this general statement (you can see many of them on Liberty's Adoption Page ), but that is the general view of the industry and I certainly don't knowingly use federation in any cross-provider operations. The time has come

I recently received a comment on my SAML Bashing blog entry. "Jeremy" (not sure which Jeremy as he was otherwise anonymous in his comment -- I wonder if it's really James in disguise -- this seems the kind of comment James would leave, but James is usually quite blatant about it, not hiding behind an identity pseudonym) asked: Kim stated "The question of how the relying party knows which identity provider URL to use is open ended. In a portal scenario, the address might be hard wired, pointing to