Almost two weeks after Bill Gates, Microsoft's Chairman and Chief Software Architect, presented InfoCard, an alliance made by three companies - IBM, Novell and Parity Communications announced the open-source alternative that achieves the same goals.

InfoCard is a personal information wallet that would allow consumers to safely manage their identities. When presenting it two weeks ago, Microsoft made a demonstration and showed how easy it was for a consumer, who was logged onto a car rental site, to quickly reserve and pay for an automobile using a card from the virtual wallet.

According to Microsoft, hackers will have a difficult time accessing InfoCard, since the application works separately from other programs installed on the computer. The company said that it plans to launch this technology somewhere this year, and that Internet Explorer 7 will contain it.

The open-source initiative is called the "Higgins Project", and the press release claims that it will spawn a new generation of security software, giving people more control over their personal online identity information.

The Higgins Project, managed by the Eclipse open source foundation, is developing software for "user-centric" identity management, an emerging trend in security software. It enables individuals to actively manage and control their online personal information, such as bank accounts, telephone and credit card numbers, or medical and employment records, rather than institutions managing that information as they do today. People will decide what information they want shared with trusted online websites that use the software.

Seattle Times' Brier Dudley talked to Tony Nadalin, IBM's chief security architect about the Higgins Project.

"Infocard is geared largely toward consumers. The IBM-backed Higgins system is primarily aimed at corporate technology users, where it could manage and process a variety of identity systems.

But because Higgins will be freely shared with anyone, a company such as Google could use it to develop a consumer-identity system that directly competes with Infocard."