One of the jobs of the OpenID Foundation is to ensure that OpenID specifications are freely implementable. As Brad Fitzpatrick (the father of OpenID) said, “Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.”

Current Specifications

Since OpenID 1.0 was released in 2005, the community has evolved and extending it to the point today where there are multiple specifications under the OpenID umbrella. To ensure that these community developed specifications are freely implementable the Foundation has required all contributors to sign a contribution agreement. This agreement both grants a copyright license to the Foundation to publish the collective specifications and includes a patent non-assertion agreement. The non-assertion agreement is incredibly important as it states that the contributor will not sue someone for implementing OpenID specifications. If you too would like to sign this agreement to help ensure that OpenID is truly free, please download the agreement (for companies or for individuals - reciprocity election form), review it, sign it, and email a scanned version to bill@oidf.org. If you prefer to send paper mail or fax your paperwork, please send an email requesting the specific contact information you require.

You can also see all of the executed agreements at http://openid.net/ipr/Non-Assertion-Agreement/executed/.

Future Specifications

The Foundation was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with representatives from many companies and numerous members of the community to develop a strong Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy as well as an IPR Process for developing future specifications. These documents are listed below as well as available here. There is also a somewhat dated OpenID IPR Rationale/FAQ (draft) that should be expanded and updated soon. Suggestions are always welcome.

The IPR Process tries to maintain the same light-weight style the community has been operating with as much as possible, while still adding the necessary legal steps to ensure that future specifications are always freely implementable. Feedback and questions on these documents are encouraged and should be sent to the mailing list legal@openid.net. We are committed to provide “common language” summaries of our legal documents soon and anyone who has an interest in helping make this happen, please send email to Bill Washburn (bill@oidf.org). Thanks for taking the time to read. We hope you will join with us in this important community effort.

OpenID Process - Word Doc
OpenID Process - PDF

OpenID IPR Policy - Word Doc
OpenID IPR Policy - PDF

Paper Contribution Agreement - Word Doc
Paper Contribution Agreement - PDF