Today at the Interop Conference in Las Vegas, Bob Muglia announced Microsoft’s sponsorship of four open source projects that are producing Information Card Relying Party software for important web programming environments: Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP, and C. The press release, which also talks about extending the Open Specification Promise to the Information Card Specifications, contains supportive quotations from several friends in the identity community: Paul Trevithick and Mary Ruddy, Tony Nadalin, Dale Olds, and Gerry Gebel.

Details on the Ruby and Java projects were announced, with details on the PHP and C projects to follow. See these sites for details:

Ruby on Rails Relying Party:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/informationcard/
http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardruby

Java Relying Party:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/informationcard/
http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardjava