Word on the street is that Ezproxy, the remote access solution for libraries, is to be acquired by OCLC. I predict a change in the licensing and potential litigation for users in the future. More to the point, this should be seen as a call for an open-source equivalent.

For years ezproxy has been an outstanding solution for providing library patrons with remote access to licensed web resources. It has been dirt cheap with excellent support. Yet, at the same time the documentation is poor and the configuration bizarre. I know, I administered a large, complicated, ezproxy for a library consortium for many years.

With all strengths and weaknesses combined, ezproxy was head-and-shoulders above any competitor. Ezproxy’s well-earned popularity meant that there was really no advantage for anyone to create an open-source equivalent. However, now that it is to be acquired by a large library vendor, we can expect many reasons to emerge. The quality of support will likely change over time. The licensing is likely to become complex.

I believe that either a Java application or a apache module with a management tool for building, managing, and distributing the rules-sets for specific web resources is in order. Apache would be interesting as it already has an API for doing authentication/authorization and could be integrated with federated identity through emerging projects that would be seperate (that is to say, ezproxy wouldn’t need to support these… apache will). This is also true of Java in some sense as well as many Java Application Servers have identity management components that would help with this. But they are not open-source (generally speaking… some specific ones are).