It's been a back and forth discussion on the OAuth list for a while now - and with some people (zealots? ;o) having ideas they weren't even willing to contribute to the OAuth group until the IPR was sorted I'm glad to finally see it's been completed, this should hopefully help to improve the longevity and adoption of the standard by some who have been fence sitting.

So what's happened?

Well all all parties involved in building the original spec have signed an agreement of non-assertion, so now OAuth can be safely implemented anywhere without concern about lawsuits related to the IP in the spec.

OAuth is a pretty elementary standard in it's version 1 state - so in some ways it was inevitable that this would happen (or at least I thought so) - there wasn't much to gain by any of the contributors blocking the progress of it becoming an open standard - but it's involved a lot of work to get it there by all accounts, so full credit goes to all involved!

For a detailed writeup check out the post from Eran Hammer-Lahav or the post on Read/write web.

Conspicuous by it's absence is Microsoft, but for no other reason than they did not contribute to the OAuth standard - and so didn't have to sign - but of course LiveId does tackle delegated authentication - so in some ways they have a competing platform for handling delegation, presumably because OAuth doesn't provide a rich enough set of features at this stage to handle some of the more complex scenarios around scalability, signing message bodies etc. - though I'm just hazarding a guess, LiveId was presented at the OAuth summit earlier this year.