Subject: Disappointed

From: Greg Connor <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:29:10 -0700 (PDT)

I was ready to send this last night, but I sat on it to give myself time to 
review and see if it's really what I want to say.  Now, following the 
announcement that the WG is to be closed, it's perhaps even more appropriate. 
I certainly don't want to start a flame war over who is at fault... I realize 
that the WG had lots more problems than just the IPR issue.  But the IPR issue 
is an important one and I want to go on record with my thoughts, in case it 
benefits future working groups faced with "encumbered" options.

I previously wrote to the group saying something like "I would rather have 
MS on board than not.  While I don't like the "contribution" being 
encumbered, I also see some advantage to having MS as a partner."

I would like to revise my statement.  After reviewing the MS patent 
applications, I found to my disappointment that it covers a lot more stuff, 
even stuff that MS clearly did not "invent".  If this patent pending 
becomes a real patent, I would need a license from MS to implement Sender 
ID, SPF, DMP, RMX, and probably even DomainKeys.

To MS I say: shame on you, for trying to take credit for other people's ideas.  
Shame on you for taking a "microinvention" such as PRA and trying to use that
to take over all email sender verification world-wide.  Shame on you for
misrepresenting the license as compatible with open source until the very last
minute.  Shame on you, Harry and Jim, for your name is on that patent
application which claims credit for the inventions of others.  If you are
really serious about getting people to use PRA or any other part of Caller ID,
place it completely in the public domain, or at least go out of your way to
make sure the license is acceptable to all, especially open source developers
and distributors.  If you are really serious about wanting to participate in a
working group, go back to your corporate masters and explain to them that
everyone else in the group will be contributing unencumbered ideas for
everyone's mutual benefit, and MS will be the only one at the table looking to
increase its own portfolio.

To the rest of the WG I say: we have been fooled once by the likes of MS; 
let's not let it happen again.  We should be *very* wary of any "idea" that 
comes to us encumbered.  If someone really wants to contribute their ideas, 
let them contribute them completely to the public domain, or let the burden 
of proof of acceptable license be upon them before their "invention" is 
given any discussion time, let alone selected for inclusion in a proposed 
standard.  We should be wary of any license that is not exposed and 
reviewed, and we should be wary of any IPR claims that refer to unpublished 
patent applications or other secret documents.  We should go out of our way 
to favor free solutions, and only consider encumbered solutions when there 
is an obvious benefit not available in the free version.  And we should 
alert other working groups to the dangers of encumbered property.  Some of us 
may find our way into other working groups and I hope we will keep IPR in mind 
if we do.

For myself, I will continue to work on this problem and be a part of this
group.  My focus will be on making sure that an unencumbered solution is
available, such as SPF with varying scope and other alternatives.  I have
always been a strong supporter of SPF and I will continue to work on trying to
make it (or something like it) available as an RFC (or at least as an
experimental RR if we can't get anything to the RFC stage).

Also, if I have any influence in the matter, I will try to make sure PRA or 
anything poisoned by MS *doesn't* make it to PS stage, though this is a 
lower priority; I'm sure the public is capable of voting with their feet if 
an unencumbered track is available.  And who knows?  Maybe our wishes will 
come true, their patent app will be denied, and nothing will really be 
encumbered anyway.  In that case MS will be thwarted in the larger crime of 
stealing everyone else's work, and will only be guilty of the lesser 
misdemeanor of wasting huge amounts of our time with legal discussions when 
we could have been talking about technical, tactical, and strategic issues.

I would also like to thank everyone who contributed time and energy, ideas 
and inspiration, collaboration and compromise, and other manner of blood, 
sweat and tears, and did so without any thought to protecting their 
"rights" to certain dubious "property".  I guess it's true that you never 
really find out the value of something until you find it conspicuously 
missing.  

We have a good group of people and I hope this list is allowed to 
stay open -- if not (or if you choose not to stay on the list for your own 
reasons) please consider spf-discuss as an alternative forum.  

--
Greg Connor
[email-masked]

Everyone says that having power is a great responsibility.  This is a lot
of bunk.  Responsibility is when someone can blame you if something goes
wrong.  When you have power you are surrounded by people whose job it is
to take the blame for your mistakes.  If they're smart, that is. 
                -- Cerebus, "On Governing"

---

From: Paul Iadonisi <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 17:37:18 -0400

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 16:29, Greg Connor wrote:

  Overall, very well stated.

[snip]

  However:

> let's not let it happen again. 

  This makes it sound like that it took this event to teach people.  I
pretty much refrained from any so-called Microsoft-bashing on this
list.  But over and over and over again, I find that people who claim
that we should give the company the benefit of the doubt, forget one
very important point: there is no doubt.  Microsoft's goals in regards
to patents, the GPL, and FOSS in general are a matter of public record. 
The company was only living up to what their executives have said in the
press.  This WG chose to ignore that, instead prohibiting any discussion
of so-called "hidden" agenda.  It wasn't hidden at all.
  I am also disappointed at the putting off of the extremely important
non-technical IPR issue until it was too late.  The members of IETF,
wanting to be faithful to the 'E' in the name, naturally want to
concentrate on engineering issues at least primarily, but even ONLY
engineering, if that's possible.  I would like to suggest that if that
is the desire, it is an impossibility.  You cannot compartmentalize your
work that way.  Especially in today's world.
  I would like to admonish everyone here that if we are going to involve
Microsoft AT ALL in any future MTA authorization efforts to remain
extremely wary.  The company has shown its colors.  Richard Stallman was
right and frankly, at least in this particular instance, should not have
been silenced.  EXPECT it to happen again and do not accept anything
less that full disclosure of ALL IPR.  And show an unwaivering
preference for unencumbered technologies.  Don't wait until all
technical matters are worked out.  I'm not saying 'to hell with
procedure'.  I'm just cautioning against letting anyone waste a colossal
amount of our time again.

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets

---

From: "Ian Peter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:43:12 +1000

Yep, I'm disappointed too. 

>   I am also disappointed at the putting off of the extremely 
> important non-technical IPR issue until it was too late.  The 
> members of IETF, wanting to be faithful to the 'E' in the 
> name, naturally want to concentrate on engineering issues at 
> least primarily, but even ONLY engineering, if that's 
> possible.  I would like to suggest that if that is the 
> desire, it is an impossibility.  You cannot compartmentalize 
> your work that way.  Especially in today's world.

That I think is the primary lesson. IETF is not structured to
deal with non-engineering issues. But it had no choice. I hope
these sort of issues are being looked at in the IETF review. 

I also have some suggestions with overall technical approach, but
as they are out of scope for MARID, and for fear of having my
ideas patented by others to the exclusion of open solutions, I'll
look for another forum to raise those.

Ian Peter
Senior Partner
Ian Peter and Associates Pty Ltd
P.O. Box 10670 Adelaide St
Brisbane 4000 Australia
Tel (617) 3870 1181
Mobile (614) 1966 7772
www.ianpeter.com
www.nethistory.info
www.internetmark2.org (Internet Analysis Report - 2004 now
available)
www.theinternettapes.com (check out the new Internet history
Audio CD and Ebook at this site)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] 
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Paul
Iadonisi
> Sent: Thursday, 23 September 2004 7:37 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Disappointed
> 
> 
> > To the rest of the WG I say: we have been fooled once by 
> the likes of 
> > MS; let's not let it happen again.
> 
>   This makes it sound like that it took this event to teach 
> people.  I pretty much refrained from any so-called 
> Microsoft-bashing on this list.  But over and over and over 
> again, I find that people who claim that we should give the 
> company the benefit of the doubt, forget one very important 
> point: there is no doubt.  Microsoft's goals in regards to 
> patents, the GPL, and FOSS in general are a matter of public
record. 
> The company was only living up to what their executives have 
> said in the press.  This WG chose to ignore that, instead 
> prohibiting any discussion of so-called "hidden" agenda.  It 
> wasn't hidden at all.
>   I am also disappointed at the putting off of the extremely 
> important non-technical IPR issue until it was too late.  The 
> members of IETF, wanting to be faithful to the 'E' in the 
> name, naturally want to concentrate on engineering issues at 
> least primarily, but even ONLY engineering, if that's 
> possible.  I would like to suggest that if that is the 
> desire, it is an impossibility.  You cannot compartmentalize 
> your work that way.  Especially in today's world.
>   I would like to admonish everyone here that if we are going 
> to involve Microsoft AT ALL in any future MTA authorization 
> efforts to remain extremely wary.  The company has shown its 
> colors.  Richard Stallman was right and frankly, at least in 
> this particular instance, should not have been silenced.  
> EXPECT it to happen again and do not accept anything less 
> that full disclosure of ALL IPR.  And show an unwaivering 
> preference for unencumbered technologies.  Don't wait until 
> all technical matters are worked out.  I'm not saying 'to 
> hell with procedure'.  I'm just cautioning against letting 
> anyone waste a colossal amount of our time again.
> 
> --
> -Paul Iadonisi
>  Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist  Ever see 
> a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.

---

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:46:35 +0200

On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 05:37:18PM -0400, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> 
> This WG chose to ignore that, instead prohibiting any discussion

It was quite interesting to see that on one hand the 
chairs were strictly claiming that this WG was free of any commercial 
interests and that everyone would be speaking privately on his 
own only, and threatening everyone to be kicked out who dared to 
question this, while this WG was slowly slaughtered by exactly those
commercial interests they disclaimed all the time.

The WG was not really going anywhere forward in a technical sense. 
Instead it - and especially it's chairs - were completely busy with 
not seeing how this working group was failing and destructed. 

I really do not understand what intention someone can have to 
chair a group this way. 

This is the more questionable after the problems with the first
ASRG chair. Everybody stresses that e-mail and spam protection is 
so important. But then it is just left to be triturated between 
commercial interests. 

I've been working on that subject in IRTF/IETF since the very 
first day of ASRG. Since then I've seen virtually everything but 
research and engineering (or only very little of it).

I am under the impression that the anti-spam related working groups
were driven by marketing, public relations, patent claims, business,
people putting themselves in the newspapers and in front of
microphones and cameras, politics and propaganda.

If the IETF will not be able to prevent this in future, it should 
consider renaming itself into ICTF (C=commercialization).

regards
Hadmut

---

From: "Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. <[email-masked]>" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 20:27:30 -0700

> to take over all email sender verification world-wide.  

Earlier this month, Matt Sergeant, of Messagegate, for whom I have a
great deal of respect, wrote, of the licensing issues with Sender
I.D.:

"I pressed him: "Will you fix the license?". I never really got a confirmed
yes or no, but my feeling was "no" when we ended the conversation. I
suggested that they give their IP to the IETF (such as I believe there is
precedence of - I know that IBM has committed patents to the public domain
before in a similar act of openness), to which I was told that Craig
believed this was a reasonable idea, but that Bill Gates himself had
vetoed that idea because of the current focus on patent gathering and IPR
issues at Microsoft."

<shaking head>..the more things change, the more they remain the same.
 I don't know how many of you knew Gary Kildall, or are familiar with
his story, but you can read about him here - pay particular attention
to the last paragraph.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/kildall_hi.html

Anne