No, I am not talking about one of my all-time favourite B movies. I’m talking about the Higgins announcement today. (Higgins being both a project at Eclipse and a Tasmanian long-tailed mouse.)
In the press release, IBM, Novell and Parity Communications announced support for the Eclipse Higgins project. The announcement was widely covered by both the press and the blogs.
If Parity Communications rings a bell, that’s because it’s the name of Paul Trevithick’s company, Paul being Higgins’ project leader. Paul, John Clippinger and Mary Ruddy are the founders of the SocialPhysics project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Higgins is the implementation of many of the ideas being worked on there.
The goals of of the project are ambitious. From the proposal:
The Higgins Trust Framework platform intends to address four challenges: the lack of common interfaces to identity/networking systems, the need for interoperability, the need to manage multiple contexts, and the need to respond to regulatory, public or customer pressure to implement solutions based on trusted infrastructure that offers security and privacy.
Higgins is definitely one of the truly innovative and interesting projects going on at Eclipse. I’m very happy to see the additional backing of IBM and Novell behind the project. It’s great news for them and for Eclipse.
If you’re interested in learning more about the project or contributing, here is the project newsgroup.
