Identity 2.0 in action
Microsoft Dreamspark" makes free copies of the full (not demo, restricted or time limited) Professional edition of Visual Studio available to college students .
While Microsoft has been giving copies of developer tools to college students for years, the Dreamspark program is rather interesting because of the identity eco-system that it is built on. All a college needs to do to become part of the program is to set up a Shiboleth identity server to provide students with a credential to tell the Microsoft stie that they are a bona-fide student.
Shiboleth is an open system based on SAML that was originally built to support inter-library loans. Microsoft are re-using the infrastructure for their program. This is the really important event. People build one-off infrastructures designed to serve a single purpose all the time. Rather less frequent is the case where an architecture designed to serve multiple purposes is actually applied beyond the original niche.
It another sign that Identity 2.0 is statring to take hold. What matters much less than the protocol employed is the social infrastructure. In particular the understanding that identity management is not something that the content provider should control but something that the user who is asserting their identity must control.
