Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Descent by Modification

If I was starting over and could choose a different career path, it would be evolutionary genetics. I guess that's why I find myself constantly looking for related analogies within my current career. And so that's why I found the matrix of SAML 2.0 conformant products (as determined by the Liberty Alliance) so interesting, specifically the feature support of HP and Trustgenix.

The rows for HP's Select Federation products and TrustGenix's IdentityBridge product are identical in the SAML 2.0 feature's they support. Given the number of permutations of possible features (even after accounting for the logical dependencies that would decrease the full number), this perfect overlap suggests a relationship between them, just as the large overlap between the DNA of humans and (for instance) chimpanzees indicates an evolutionary relationship between them.

That's why I was so pleased to track down this press release describing just such a relationship - specifically an OEM one. The two products share the same SAML 2.0 feature support because, in a sense, HP's product is descended from that of TrustGenix (at least with respect to support for SAML 2.0).

I'm not suggesting that we are descended from chimps. maybe that's a shame - pygmy chimps (or Bonobos) do seem have to found a gratifying lifestyle.

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