When is a passport not a passport? When it's a Passport®.

(October 11, 2001 - 8 a.m.) -That's the reason why Sun Microsystems feels that Microsoft - whose Passport® system for identifying users on the Net already boasts no fewer than 165-million users - needs now to be played at its own game. The Achilles' heel, Sun believes, is that (surprise, surprise) MS has opted for a proprietary solution. And that there are still lingering security issues surrounding Passport®.

Enter "The Liberty Alliance Project."

Somewhat grandiloquently named, at present anyway, this is Sun's attempt, introduced at the very end of September, to rally the Internet industry troops in a concerted attempt to set out "a roadmap to address business practices, privacy, consumer adoption and technology evolution." Or, in other words, to try and come up with a rival to Passport® that is more secure while at the same time being non-proprietary and standards-based. And, above all, a rival that does not seem to threaten users' privacy in any way.

A tall order? Maybe so, but it's an attainable goal, according to Sun chairman and CEO Scott McNealy: "The Liberty Alliance Project will leverage and cooperate with existing open, and interoperable standards" proclaims McNealy to those lining up with Sun in this alliance, "that will unleash an Internet that roams with you and your customers, wherever they and your business partners take you"

Sun's industry partners in the endeavor are indeed formidable. They include the world's largest wireless player, Vodafone ("We look forward to working with the Liberty Alliance members to develop an open approach to network identity," says Alan Harper, Vodafone group strategy director); the Net's foremost security player RSA Security ("As a leader in e-security, we believe we can offer the Liberty Alliance valuable expertise in the areas of user authentication, access rights management, data privacy, and transaction integrity," says Art Coviello, CEO and president); and Japanese telco giant NTT DoCoMo ("I think that we can generate new value to our customers by combining the strategies in the Liberty Alliance and our platform," says Managing Director Takeshi Natsuno).

The list goes on, from GM to SAP to eBay to Nokia to Global Crossing to Dun & Bradstreet -- 33 charter members in allŠand counting.

JavaDevelopersJournal.com turned to Microsoft Corp's Adam Sohn, product manager for the .NET Platform, and asked whether Passport® was going to be radically changed in any way by the Liberty Alliance's counterinitiative. His reply was defiant.

"This announcement," says Sohn, "is a strong if belated validation of Microsoft's vision of user-centric services. If Sun, et al, were really interested in universal authentication, they would federate with Passport's 165 million accounts as opposed to trying to build a new island of authentication some time in the future."

"Sun has absolutely nothing to deliver to customers," Sohn asserts, "and will not have anything any time soon."

"The difference is," he says, "[that] we've already laid out a technological roadmap based on the open Kerberos industry standard. We are very hopeful that the Liberty Alliance will adopt that technology standard and drive that forward as opposed to creating an entirely new infrastructure. We're concerned that this will stall the industry."

In an exclusive interview with JavaDevelopersJournal.com the well respected industry commentator Roger Sessions, CEO of Object Watch and a longtime observer of the battle between .NET and J2EE, comments controversially from India, where he is presently on a lecture tour:

"The last original idea Sun had was the Java Virtual Machine."

Sessions explains, "As far as I can see, everything Sun has done since then has been taking Microsoft's technology innovations and rewriting them as Java. They rewrote MTS as EJB, copied Queued Components as Message Driven Beans, claimed that Microsoft/IBM's SOAP and WSDL was really their idea, and now are stealing Passport and calling it Liberty."

"It is very sad for me," concludes Sessions, "to watch a company that at one time had been an innovative industry leader being reduced to acting like a sniveling, whining copycat."