Open Source Blog

Bandit is yet to be officially launched, but details are available on its work to define a common identity framework for authentication, roles and authorization, and compliance via common record collecting.

According to the FAQ, Novell will be contributing "significant engineering, web, marketing and management resources to the effort" and is hoping to set the project engineering goals in consultation with an emerging Bandit community.

Bandit currently has a number of sub-projects, including CASA, Common Identity, Compliance Record Framework, FLAIM, XFLAIM, and Role Engine. Each has its own roadmap and goals, which can be found here.

Meanwhile, if you're thinking Bandit is an unusual name for a security project, you're not alone. The project explains - or doesn't - that the choice had to do with dogs. Unfortunately, I'm reminded of Smokey IS The Bandit, which - legend has it - was one dog of a film.

Either way, it's interesting to see Novell expanding its open source projects beyond Linux and infrastructure management and into the ID management side of its business.

Apologies, incidentally, if this is old news to you: it's just one of the things I'm catching up on after my return to the office. Other news of note you may also have missed include Red Hat's launch of the Mugshot social networking service, Ubuntu targeting the enterprise, and the European Commission apparently confirming that software is not patentable.

More on these, perhaps, and some other things, once I've had my second coffee of the day…

Oh yes, and Sun has announced that it will open source Java. I suppose that's significant as well. ;-)