December 10th, 2008
Microsoft hires digital-identity/open-source maven Dick Hardt
Microsoft’s hiring slowdown hasn’t translated to a complete hiring freeze. Among the newest of the Red-Pill poppers is Dick Hardt.
Hardt is the founder and CEO of Sxip Identity. He is known for his take on the “Identity 2.0″ concept (and blog of the same name). Identity 2.0, or digital identity, is focused on using emerging technologies like OpenID to improve cross-vendor authentication and user security.
Among Hardt’s other claims to fame: He founded ActiveState, an open-source programming language and anti-spam software vendro that was purchased by Sophos in 2003. According to Wikipedia, Hardt also is “credited with the port of the Perl programming language to Windows, which, at the time, was highly controversial in the open source community.”
Hardt is moving from Vancouver, Canada, to the Redmond area. His new title at Microsoft will be “Partner Architect.” He described his new role, in a posting to the Identity 2.0 site, as:
“working on consumer, enterprise and government identity problems. My open source, open web and digital community experience will continue to guide my thinking. For me, this is an opportunity to work on the identity problems I have been toiling over for the last six years, but now with massive resources.”
Hardt said he will remain chair of Sxipper, a company that makes an identity-management add-on for Firefox.
(Hat tip to Nick Katsivelos for the pointer on Hardt.)
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