Elinor Mills Abreu

SAN FRANCISCO: Sun Microsystems Inc. said on Thursday it will join rivals Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. in developing a technical standard to make sure Web services transactions are secure.

Sun made the decision to join them on the WS-Security Web Services specification after getting assurances from them that they would not charge other companies to license any technology associated with the specification, said Bill Smith, director of Liberty Alliance technology for Sun.

Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign Inc. first announced the WS-Security specification in April, but hadn't announced exactly how they were planning to standardize it.

Microsoft has been criticized in the past for pushing proprietary technology that does not work with products from other vendors. That prompted Sun to spearhead an alternative Web services effort, dubbed Liberty Alliance, to compete with Microsoft's.

However, Microsoft seems to be responding to the criticism. For example, the company said earlier this month that its .NET Passport consumer service will work with popular security technologies used by rivals. With regard to the Web services security effort, Sun was also impressed that Microsoft was taking its specification to the standards body called the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), Smith said.

"Sun has always been, and remains, supportive of the development of specifications and standards out in the open, at respected industry organizations, like OASIS," he said.

"In addition, Sun is committed to the availability of Web infrastructure technology on a royalty-free basis, and it's under those terms, we understand, that IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign are willing to license the technology," Smith added. "With those two conditions met, it was an easy decision for Sun to participate."

Microsoft and IBM approached Sun with the offer to join the group, according to Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services technical marketing at Microsoft. "Adding Sun to the mix really is (an example of) us extending olive branches to each other and understanding the need to work together," VanRoekel said.

While, Microsoft and Sun may still go head-to-head on other technology standards related to Web services, at least there will be agreement on how to handle security, one of the most vital aspects to the nascent movement aimed at enabling corporations to more easily conduct business online.

"There will be fragmentation in some areas, but a little less in security" now, said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner Inc. The industry "will somehow surmount the differences, but things would be better for users if they would use (all) the same standards."

VeriSign also announced on Thursday that it would donate the source code for an implementation of WS-Security to the open-source community. Unlike proprietary software, open source software is freely used, modified and developed by a community of programmers.

Other companies that plan to participate in the OASIS development effort on WS-Security include: Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp., Novell Inc., SAP AG, RSA Security Inc., BEA Systems Inc., Baltimore Technologies Inc., Documentum Inc., Entrust Inc., IONA Technologies Plc, Netegrity Inc., Oblix, OpenNetwork Technologies and Systinet

(C) Reuters Limited.