The Liberty Alliance today unveiled its openLiberty Project, a global initiative to offer resources and support to open source developers building identity-based applications.

The global identity consortium also launched openLiberty.org, a portal where developers can collaborate on the openLiberty Project and access tools and information for developing applications based on the Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services standards.

OpenLiberty was launched under the direction and leadership of the Liberty Alliance Open Source Special Interest Group.

This group was formed to coordinate global open source initiatives and to identify the open source libraries developers need to build applications that interoperate with Liberty Federation (ID-FF 1.1, 1.2 and SAML 2.0) and Liberty Web Services (ID-WSF 1.0, 1.1, 2.0) and Liberty People Service specifications.

Members of the group have identified the need to focus on delivering ID-WSF Web Services Consumer libraries to allow open source developers to incorporate SAML 2.0 functionality into web services applications.

"The openLiberty Project will allow open source developers to incorporate the security and privacy capabilities of Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services into a variety of identity-based applications," said Jason Rouault, vice president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and chief technology officer for identity management software at HP.

Roger Sullivan, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice president of Oracle Identity Management, added: "The launch of openLiberty.org offers new opportunities for developers to leverage the work of Liberty Alliance in order to speed the development of open source identity initiatives."