Pat Patterson on Federated Identity Infrastructure

Awhile back, Pat Patterson commented on a posting where I stated that I believed Microsoft is doing a great thing by building federation capabilities directly into the operating system. His belief is that there is merit for federation infrastructure to remain separate.

I have recently learned that BEA Weblogic 9.1 and greater has SAML support built-in. I wonder if he also thinks this is good or evil?

The folks from JBoss are building in XACML support into JBoss 5.0, something of which BEA has had for a little while. Sun at some level has shown leadership by creating the reference implementation for XACML but hasn't yet incorporated XACML support into all of their products. The obvious one would be portal.

Word on the blogosphere is that Microsoft will finally start embracing XACML in order to catch up to IBM. Likewise, CA, BEA and Oracle already are supporting in their products. Does this leave Sun in the dust?