The Linux Foundation’s latest open source initiative, the Janssen Project, is a cloud native identity and access management platform based on the Gluu Server that tackles online trust and security.

Engineers from IDEMIA, F5, BioID, Couchbase, and Gluu will make up the technical steering committee for the new open source project.

Gluu CEO Mike Schwartz, who chairs the new Janssen Project technical steering committee, founded Gluu in 2009, and built an enterprise platform, the Gluu Server, based on open source software for identity and access management (IAM). The open source part was important, Schwartz said, because he wanted to make application security available to a larger number of organizations as opposed to other proprietary, expensive IAM technologies that lock customers in to a particular vendor.

“And we really geared the product toward the large enterprise space, especially toward more customer-facing applications rather than employee-facing applications,” he said. “Because companies might have millions of customers or countries might have millions of citizens, so we geared the product more toward the high-end requirements of customer identity and access management.”

Eleven years later, the Gluu Server has passed more OpenID self-certification tests than any other IAM platform, and it can perform more than 1 billion authentications per day. The latter, the company said, is made possible by advances in cloud native technology and hosted Kubernetes services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

A little over a year ago, Schwartz started hosting a podcast called Open Source Underdogs where he interviews founders of open source software companies, “and it got me thinking about how we could increase the size of the [Gluu] community and ecosystem,” he said.

So after its first 10 years of what Schwartz described as an “enlightened despotism” for the Gluu Server, the company decided to hand it over to the Linux Foundation.

“The Linux Foundation was a really good fit for us because we want to coalesce an ecosystem of vendors who want to use this technology in their product," Schwartz said. "And we felt that the Linux Foundation was a neutral place where we could build a consensus-based governance framework for the project.”

The Linux Foundation — as opposed to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) —  is somewhat of an interesting choice to host the Janssen Project, however, because the Gluu Server is a cloud native project. Schwartz said it’s important to recognize that not all enterprises are building container-based applications, some still use virtual machines (VMs), and the Janssen Project wants to meet customers wherever they are at in their cloud journey.

“The Janssen project is looking to straddle cloud native, because that’s the most important direction for the future, but we’re not forgetting about the fact that not everyone is cloud native yet," Schwartz explained. "So, so we’re gonna make distributions for VMs. But we are saying that in terms of scalability, and autoscaling, and security, there’s a whole bunch of advantages to cloud native that we love.”