Subject: Re: AOL's stance on SenderID and IPR issues

From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:12:14 +0100

It is my understanding that Yahoo is one of the largest (if not the largest) companies using qmail and there have been substantial discussions on this list in the last day that license terms may not compatible with that at all.

As Matt and others point out, this is irrelevant, as the license does not impact end-users of the code, only people who will redistribute it (which qmail doesn't allow anyways ;)

False.  One is permitted to
distribute the original qmail package.  One can also distribute other people's
patches to it, as long as their own respective
licences, from their own respective authors, permit them to be
redistributed of course.  (And indeed, this is exactly what happens
right now with netqmail.)
Since the code covered by the purported Microsoft patent would be in a
patch, not in qmail proper, Microsoft's patent licence
would not affect qmail one whit.  qmail would be redistributable under
the same terms as it is now.  Microsoft's patent licence would,
however, affect the patch.  (The patch would
have to be branded with a trademark.  It would have to be in object
code, not source code, form.  It would have to be
non-redistributable by "End Users" - the Microsoft patent licence does
impact end users of the code - and thus couldn't be distributed under a
licence such as the GPL.  And so on.)

Moral: Don't go to an employee of Sendmail Inc. for correct information
about qmail.  (-:

---

From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:10:57 +0100

[We]
are one of the larger installations of qmail (2500 servers). However as
a commercial company, like AOL, we don't have a problem with the
[Microsoft] license. We can develop our own implementation and request
a license from Microsoft to do so. The qmail license would only affect
us if we wanted to distribute that code to others.

You mean the Microsoft patent licence, not the qmail copyright
licence.  The qmail
copyright licence doesn't affect your distribution of your own code
implementing Sender-ID as an add-on to qmail.  It's the Microsoft
patent licence that affects that.  (Your own code must be branded with
a trademark.  You cannot distribute your own code in source form.  You
cannot permit the recipients to redistribute your own code in their
turn.  And so forth.)