HTTP already has its own authentication system, and there are hundreds — perhaps thousands — of tools that know how to work with it. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to use that in our own scripts, but have something communicate with the services using OAuth behind the scenes? Thus, foauth.org was born.

Rather than try to build a bunch of bells and whistles and make everything really complicated, we focused on just one task: taking OAuth out of the equation when accessing your own data. So, unlike Apigee, we’re not monitoring your API usage or promising any statistics or anything like that. Our goal is to help you login with OAuth-compliant services using HTTP Basic authentication. That’s it.