When Oracle bought Sun, there were many unanswered questions about Sun's open-source portfolio of programs. Over a year later, we still don't know, for example, if OpenSolaris is going to have Oracle's support. We now know, however, that OpenSSO, an open source access management and federation server platform, will live on as a product under the new open-source company ForgeRock.
ForgeRock is an ISV (independent software vendor) made up of former Sun business and technology experts. The company claims that it based its "business exclusively on open source products." The first of these is its I3 Open Platform. This identify management suite is built on top of several open-source including OpenAM, which is based on OpenSSO); OpenESB; OpenIdM; and OpenPortal, which is built on LifeRay.

According to Simon Phipps, former chief open source officer at Sun and, as of today, May 10th, a member of ForgeRock's board and the Norwegian company's chief strategy officer. ForgeRock's I3 Open Platform is an open, high-performance and unified platform addressing.

In an interview, Phipps told me that he thinks that ForgeRock is the first company to do a serious attempt at a "pure-play open source business. While Oracle own all the copyrights, ForgeRock will be selling subscriptions that give strong SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that meet the needs of people using access management." At the same time, ForgeRock will be hiring developers to keep the code current, update it to keep it up to date with the latest operating system releases, and support for integration on latest applications."

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