DotNetOpenAuth, created by Andrew Arnott, was accepted to the Outercurve Foundation’s ASP.NET gallery today. The open-source project is a free, community-based library of standards-based authentication and authorization protocols used in websites and Web applications for .NET developers and others.

The project is housed on SourceForge, and will continue to be hosted and maintained by Andrew Arnott and the DotNetOpenAuth community. Outercurve will provide IT support where needed along with a larger community, according to Stephen Walli, technical director at Outercurve, a not-for-profit foundation that hosts three galleries and 12 projects, with DotNetOpenAuth being the sixth in the ASP.NET gallery.

“Andrew assigned the copyright to us and we manage the software intellectual property. We will provide services and help him grow the project, and encourage the community’s growth,” Walli said, adding that commercial interests are much more likely to become involved with the project now that it has been accepted by the foundation.

Walli explained that this is initially how software foundations came to be created, such as Apache in the late 1990s. He said that commercial companies are often anxious about working with projects maintained by individuals as individuals cannot offer assurances that the work will not contribute to a competitors’ success, something many vendors do not want to do.

Walli said mobile vendors will probably be the first to look into the project, as that is where much of the growth in the tech industry is happening—particularly with security.

“The Web is maturing; we’re finally hitting the next wave and [DotNetOpenAuth] is really timely,” said Walli. “We’re just stepping into a new space, with SaaS projects and offerings, and to incorporate these authorization and authentication protocols is a fabulous opportunity for the ASP.NET world.”

Paula Hunter, executive director of Outercurve, said that the project was presented to the foundation a few weeks ago. Outercurve does not have a classic incubation stage; instead gallery managers find, vet and present the projects to the board. Hunter said Bradley Millington, the ASP.NET gallery’s manager, has done well in “spreading the word in the .NET open-source community” to attract new contributors and committers, which is how he recruited Arnott and his DotNetOpenAuth project and community.