[Python-Dev] Offtopic: OpenID Providers (original) (raw)

Dan Callahan dcallahan at mozilla.com
Fri Sep 6 19:22:49 CEST 2013

On 9/5/13 12:31 PM, Jesus Cea wrote:

I have big hopes for Mozilla Persona, looking forward Python infrastructure support :).

Hi, I'm the project lead on Persona signin, and I spoke at PyCon earlier this year regarding why and how Mozilla is building Persona. If you'd like some more background, that video 0 is worth a look.

Let's pull this discussion up a level:

It sounds like many people (Jesus, Donald, Toshio, Barry, Tres, Dirkjan, etc.) are interested in seeing Persona on Python.org properties, and most of the objections coming from a place of "Persona hasn't gone viral, what if this is wasted effort?"

We can tackle that from two angles:

  1. Dirkjan and I are willing to do the work to make this happen if someone from python-devel is willing to guide us through the contributor process for these systems.

  2. There's a seamless migration path away from Persona if we fail: fall back to the pre-existing traditional email/password system using the same email addresses that Persona had previously been in charge of verifying.

So let's do this. The open web deserves better than just Google+, Facebook, or Passwords, and visible support from the Python community would be a huge step toward answering the chicken-and-egg objections raised in this thread.

At your service, -Callahad

PS: Freeform OpenID has utterly failed as a user-empowering authentication system, and the protocol itself is rapidly being supplanted by vendor-specific OAuth[1] systems. If we want to ensure that "you can (not must) use free and open services to access our resources," then we must provide an option to use something akin to Persona.

[1]: "Google's OpenID service is being replaced by Login with OAuth 2.0." https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/GettingStarted

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