With Identity Commons going live this past Monday, I finally had a moment to breathe and write a bit about our business model, which depends upon our software being open source and available.

At 2idi (disclaimer: I am a co-founder) we are building open source software to give people complete control over their personal information.

We are basing our technology on a new, open (OASIS) standard called XRI that provides, among other things, data portability. This means you can move the "home" of your identity to any XRI-compliant identity broker (i-broker) and the data itself can be stored at the service provider of your choice.

Simply put, in order for people to have control, they must have a choice regarding not only who can see their data, for what purpose and how that data is used, but also where it is stored and by whom it will be managed. So our software MUST be open source in order to ensure that our customers have that choice. If we did anything to "lock in" our customers, it would be against this very purpose.

It is through this transparency that we plan to prosper - by creating a brand that is stable, secure, open and thus deserving of trust. We understand that anyone making disclosures of personal or otherwise sensitive information must feel safe from harm, real or imagined. Once people have a place they can trust, they can choose to "open up" in order to receive desired services, make better connections and work together more effectively.

Our goal is to make this technology so safe that even we - the owners of this system - could not pry into people's lives - or retrieve their Real Names - without their consent.

Such trust and safety offers unparalleled opportunities for matching, social networking, cooperation and true, permission-driven (I'm going to use the M-word) marketing in ways as yet unavailable without total loss of control over one's personal information.

We believe that this initiative is not only good for the earth and its inhabitants, but also has a very real potential to be financially rewarding for everyone involved.