Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! jump on board OpenID

The OpenID Foundation has announced support from some big names.

The foundation, which is pushing for a universal internet login standard, has announced representatives from IBM, Google, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have become its first corporate board members. They join the executive director Bill Washburn and existing board members.

Several major technology companies, including Yahoo!, had already voiced support for the standard.

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OpenID started as a grassroots initiative to handle an increasingly complex internet rife with user accounts, logins and passwords galore, and some sceptics thought it couldn't possibly earn the approval of tech's biggest players. But its creators have gone on to build serious web credibility, which has undoubtedly helped the standard move from an experimental project toward industry-wide adoption.

Founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who developed the standard in 2005 while working at Six Apart, is now an engineer at Google and has been a key component of its OpenSocial developer initiative.

Fitzpatrick said in a statement from the OpenID Foundation: "Google shares the OpenID Foundation's vision of a web that's easy to use and built on open standards available to everyone. OpenID was always intended to be a decentralised sign-on system, so it's fantastic [for Google] to join a foundation committed to keeping it free and unencumbered by proprietary extensions."

The representatives from the OpenID Foundation's new corporate board members are Dewitt Clinton (Google), Tony Nadalin (IBM), Michael B Jones (Microsoft), Gary Krall (VeriSign) and Shreyas Doshi (Yahoo!).

Original article: OpenID Foundation scores top-shelf board members from CNET News.com