The seven new members are: American Express, AOL Time Warner, France Telecom, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, MasterCard International and an unnamed “major” commercial bank. The other founders of the Alliance and members of the management board are: Sun Microsystems, Bell Canada, Global Crossing, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Openwave Systems, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sony Corporation, United Airlines and Vodafone.
Eric Dean, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board, said:
"The Alliance is rapidly moving forward to develop a commercially-viable, open, ubiquitous standard for network identity, authentication and authorisation across a multitude of business systems and consumer products touched by the internet - from cellular phones to web browsers and automobiles."
Dean also said that the Alliance is trying to bring Microsoft on board. According to ZDNet, the Alliance is not building a system, rather it is building a blueprint for passing data. So Microsoft could, in theory, keep its Passport system and still join the Alliance. According to Computer Weekly, Microsoft is interested. A spokesman told the magazine, “There are a few issues that we would have to work out before joining.”
In addition to the founding members, other companies that have expressed their intent to participate in the Alliance include: American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Cisco Systems, eBay, and Verisign.