Title: Social and Business mission of Gluu
1Social and Business mission of Gluu
- Gluu has both a social and a business mission.
These missions need not be at odds. In fact they
are symbiotic. The business vision of Gluu is
quite simple offer a utility service to help
organizations control access to valuable online
resources. Our social mission is to make the
Internet a safer place for people and businesses
by writing great open source software. -
- When Gluu came in existence in 2009, Web access
management tools were too expensive for many
organizations. There are millions of domains on
the Internet. Access management software like
Siteminder had a small impact because only the
Fortune 500 could afford it. Open source software
was piece of the solution. The other piece was to
provide a cost effective mechanism to enable
organizations to support the open source
software, so they could build and operate a
mission critical IT service. -
- Utilities provide the economies of scale to drive
down the cost of technology, making it available
to a wider audience. At the dawn of the electric
era, only the largest companies could afford
electricity. They built power plants on rivers.
It wasnt until the advent of electric utilities
that drove down the price of electricity that
small businesses and ordinary people could use
it. Big businesses also benefitedthey no longer
had to build and maintain their own power plants.
2Gluus utility access management service funds
our social mission. To make the Internet a safer
place, we need to make security software more
available to developers and system
administrators. The infrastructure we are
building today will provide a coral reef on which
a diverse ecosystem of new Internet services can
thrive. Networks have an ebb and flow of
centralization and decentralization. At first, a
technology is introduced by an innovative
company. For-profit companies inevitably are
quicker to invent products to address market
needs. Over time, standards emerge, and the
networks decentralize. We saw it with Compuserve
and Email, AOL and the Web. With better identity
standards, Google and Facebook may get their
comeuppance. In the 90s, it would have been
crazy to imagine every organization launching
their own AOL. And yet, that is exactly what the
Web made possible. And the result of this was a
network richer and more diverse than any media
executive at AOL ever imagined. Furthermore, the
Web was hacked to achieve purposes never
envisioned by AOL executives. Internet identity
is at a similar stage as the Web in 1995. Right
now we use services like Dropbox, Google and
other centralized services to share files and
data.
3These services rely on us having accounts in the
central node. I can only share a doc on Google
with you if you have a Google account. Or worse
services rely on security by obscurity (which is
not really security at all). With standards and
open source software, each domain could build
their own data federation services like Google,
or perhaps new services that no Google engineer
has even imagined. This trans-formative vision
for a decentralized and safer Internet motivates
our team at Gluu. And hopefully well also make
some money. If we can do a little of both, or a
lot of both, well be satisfied that struggle was
worth it. Article Resource-http//thegluuserver
.tumblr.com/post/69043948369/social-and-business-m
ission-of-gluu