Kveton gave OpenID all he had for several years.
#Firefox download mirror driver#
OpenID is hopefully going to be the driver of that the HTTP of identity. I believe in 5 years, there will be a federated identity that people use all over the Internet you’ll have one login and it won’t be controlled by anyone but you. Has federated identity failed? In the past, yes. It’s truly got to be open and decentralized and that’s one of the main reasons people are finding it compelling. For something like this to be compelling there can be no hook back to the “mother ship”. OpenID really is a grassroots, bottom-up approach. He explained his interest and belief in the idea like this three years ago: Kveton was the Chair of the foundation for 2 years, then co-Chair for one year. The Foundation brought together many of the biggest companies in the world and many innovative engineers, to talk about how companies would be better served by allowing users to travel freely from site to site with interoperable identities than by locking users in to a single, non-portable identity. He became the CEO of online identity provider JanRain and co-founded the OpenID Foundation. Going StartupĪfter continued success hosting other open source projects (like Drupal) at the Lab, Kveton decided he wanted to try something entrepreneurial. With a workable network management system quickly put into place, Firefox went on to see 1 million downloads on its official launch date.
Kveton says Mozilla didn’t want to use his program, but by 9:30 AM PST the mirror network was toast.
#Firefox download mirror software#
So he helped write a piece of software that would manage that network automatically when under a heavy load. Kveton suspected that the public reception would be enthusiastic enough to melt the network of mirror download providers for the browser around the world. Within that same first year of the Lab’s lifetime, Firefox was born and officially launched to the public. That essential piece of hardware remains at the Lab today. Arrangements were made to host the kernel at the Open Source Lab, the machine was flown from San Francisco in a Cessna and Kveton rolled out a red carpet. The parties responsible had built the server from the bare metal up, thus they were assured that no security compromise could be introduced from the outside at that core level and infect countless computers around the world. Shortly after the Open Source Lab’s birth, the Linux kernel was in need of a new home. That was 6 years ago and those contacts have been invaluable throughout the rest of his career. Soon Kveton had a staff of 25 students and contacts all over the Open Source world. Then Google, IBM and other big companies started giving the new Lab money to host open source projects they were working on. The school decided to put the budget surplus back into the paradigm that made the difference. After working at various big tech companies for a few years, he had joined the University and cut its hardware budget by 75% the previous year – just by buying open source Linux servers. When Kveton was 31 years old he founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Can Kveton build this behind-the-scenes group of engineers into a viable company? Early momentum makes odds look good and Kveton’s personal history says that one way or the other it’s going to be a wild ride. Push notifications and in-app purchases are a very big deal for the mobile developer ecosystem. Last night the innovative “mobile push as a service” company called Urban Airship that Kveton and a handful of savvy, unemployed friends launched just over six months ago announced it has raised $1.1 million in financing to grow into a bigger service provider. As you can expect, it could make a substantial impact on the future of the web. Last night he announced his next big move. Kveton is a dynamic, intelligent, skilled and flawed human being who is creating a very interesting life story for himself. Then he spent a year selling bacon on the internet, until flipping to an acquirer and signing a deal to write a book about lightweight, agile startups. He was key to bringing the biggest web companies to the table to develop OpenID and other federated identity systems. Not yet 40 years old, Scott Kveton built the organization that houses the Linux kernel and he saved the day when Firefox launched but all the download mirrors were overwhelmed.
One story you might not know yet is the tale of Scott Kveton’s young, unusual, accelerated and admirable career. Geekdom may be a land of big personalities, but some peoples’ stories are better known than others.