Sun Microsystems and its allies will unveil the detailed workings of their Liberty Alliance specification Monday, providing competition to Microsoft's Passport service for easing the hassle of logging on to different Web sites. Microsoft triggered the Liberty Alliance formation through its Passport service, which serves the same function and which the Gartner Group says now has 14 million users. Passport was initially a Microsoft-only service, although the company has begun broadening it somewhat.
Sun countered with Liberty in September and quickly assembled prestigious backers, including Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, Sprint, Vodafone, Nokia ( news - web sites), eBay, American Airlines and VeriSign. Later members included American Express, America Online, Hewlett-Packard and Visa International. Tech heavyweights IBM and Oracle have not joined.
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