Dale Olds has posted a really wonderful blog entry that attempts to tease out all of the threads that began here with a post on "the identity bus" and morphed into a fight (okay, disagreement) over meta vs. virtual directories.
In Dale's eyes, the meta vs. virtual question comes down to an "identity hub" versus "identity bus" issue.
Further, Dale goes on to argue that the "political bottleneck" of different applications living in different departments is at the heart of where people fall on the hub versus bus tale.
Finally, Dale says (I think - I'm interpreting a bit here) that as applications "un-silo" in a more distributed architecture, the bus will have to "win out" -- though that doesn't necessarily mean a victory of meta over virtual.
Quoting:
"To me, this fits very well the notion of an identity bus — like a message passing bus. Not a hub. It needs to be a chain or channel where a particular chunk of identity data (e.g. a token) can be passed through, and potentially acted on, by multiple administrative control points. Most emerging identity systems support some notion of passing tokens or assertions between identity domains for this reason. "
Go read the whole thing.
