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Alistair Young: > > I believe (possibly incorrectly) that the Shibboleth to > Athens gateway > > will > > stop being funded in 2011 but if the resource providers > behind it are > > shielded by the gateway from shibboleth, will they ever > migrate to the > > federation? Jon Warbrick: > Remember that resource providers pay real money to use > Athens. Moving to > pure Shibboleth will avoid them having to do so. Further, at > least for new > developments or redevelopments, implementing Shib will > (should) meet the > needs of the UK and much of the rest of the world, saving > them from the > additional costs of implimenting Athens. I believe that the position re funding the Gateways is that JISC have already given assurances of funding for them until 2011 (beyond which they're not able to make any promises, about anything, because the Government doesn't approve JISC's funding any further ahead than that!). There is no more reliable reason to believe that they will necessarily "stop being funded" after 2011 - if they're still needed for some reason. Jon highlights two important motives for resource suppliers to implement Shib; and for them to cease using Athens (and therefore relying on the Gateways) themselves: 1) Supporting Shib/SAML compliant Federated Access Management, for institutional clients, will make them potentially more attractive to the communities of all the other national markets in which compatible FAM federations are being established - notably the USA; 2) I believe that they do pay significant annual license fees to use the proprietary Athens service-provider-equivalent software, on some scale proportional to their 'size'. I expect the exact amounts are covered by some kind of non-disclosure clause in their contracts with Eduserv, although if Eduserv were willing to publish a scale of charges for commercial service providers (as they have done for institutions after July 2008), it would help everyone make better-informed decisions. Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm