Renaming Object Capabilities to Authorization Capabilities?

Hi all,

This is related to the OCAP-LD spec that some of us are working on in
this community:

https://w3c-ccg.github.io/ocap-ld/

Digital Bazaar's engagement with customers over the past several months
wrt. the term "Object Capabilities" has resulted in confusion around
exactly what an Object Capability is.

Some history -- the "Object Capabilities" name was originally picked to
differentiate from the "Linux Capabilities" stuff, which really didn't
have much to do with capabilities (in the authorization sense). Object
Capabilities makes more sense when you're talking about programming
languages, but we don't really use it in that sense in this community.

I propose we name the specification more appropriately in the hope that
the name evokes what we're actually doing with the specification. The
technology we're developing in this community specifically has to do
with Authorization... capability-based authorization. Thus, I'm
suggesting the spec is renamed to "Authorization Capabilities"...
shortened to "zCaps" for the cool kids in the community.

Also, this is a bike shed discussion, so I fully expect it to get out of
hand and for us to have to do a poll like we did for the Verifiable
Credentials terminology. Please only suggest names that you're committed
to using with your customers (or that you would use with non-technical
folks). If we get a bunch of +1s with no strong objections, we're
done... and yes, I know that's wishful thinking. :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches

Received on Saturday, 3 November 2018 15:25:52 UTC