Subject: DEPLOY: A personal take on the IPR topic

From: Mark Lentczner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 14:42:08 -0700

As the chairs have asked for information about personal deployment, I 
wanted to share my view on the topic of IPR:

In light of the license terms, I will not be coding any implementation 
of the portions of SenderID that are covered by the IPR claim.

I do not come to this conclusion lightly, or happily.  It took quite 
some time to read and digest the Microsoft IPR license, and to consider 
the review by open source lawyers that I respect (specifically Larry 
Rosen and Eben Moglen).

All my computer work these days is for free.  And, as I don't work on 
mail code that will have direct end-users, all my work in this area is 
for inclusion in yet other projects.  Hence, anything I wrote for 
SenderID would require a new license by anyone who choose to 
incorporate my work.  I do not wish to encumber my work this way.

I do support SenderID, and hope the current set of drafts (or something 
close) will be promoted by this working group.  I am also glad that 
others will undertake to write free software (in the general sense) 
that will implement it within the bounds of the license.  I will, as an 
end-user, run such software on my servers.

I will continue to work on the protocol aspects of SenderID, since 
these are not covered by the IPR.  I will continue to edit the draft as 
co-author, and will continue work on various implementations of it 
(such as record parsers and generators.)

	- Mark

Mark Lentczner
http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/
[email-masked]

---

From: wayne <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 20:44:46 -0500

> of the portions of SenderID that are covered by the IPR claim.

I will add my own personal deployment take.

I am the co-author of one of the most widely used SPF implementations.
Since I wrote the implementation in order to help out with the
spam/forgery problem, it is important to me to have this
implementation distributed far and wide.  It is also important for me
to run my own code.

I do not believe that the current SenderID license will be accepted by
most Linux and *BSD distributions and code requiring that license
would be excluding from those distributions.   A great deal of work
has been done by others to get this SPF implementation into various
distributions and patches written for most MTAs.

It I believe that it would therefore be counter productive to develope
or deploy SenderID.  I believe that this will likely slow the
deployment by many others.

-wayne

---

From: "Ian Peter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 14:10:13 +1000

I am hoping for a breakthrough here. Attached a copy of my email
to Bill Gates - I suggest similar emails to senior executives at
Microsoft might be useful, especially if you have personal
contacts, because I feel sure we are dealing with bureaucratic
defensive legal tendencies here rather than managerial policy
decisions. That might be able to be reversed.

My email said basically

"Bill,

The adoption of Sender-ID seems under threat at IETF because of a
defensive patent/licensing condition Microsoft's legal people
seem intent on pushing.

The patent claim appears to be scant in any case because of prior
art. I believe that it might be time for a policy decision to be
taken to override this - that Microsoft intends to drop any legal
rights it might have in this case to co-operate with the rest of
the Internet community in fighting spam. That sounds like good
public relations to me and I believe Microsoft stands to gain
rather than lose by not imposing license conditions which are
seen as threatening by many in the open source community. 

Your Harry Katz and Jim Lyons and others have done great work in
co-operating with the rest of the community to bring out a
suitable standard. It would be a pity if any of this effort to
deal with the most significant problem facing email users was at
all undermined by your standard legal procedures. I think 5
minutes of your time could yield enormous benefits here."

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.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 wayne
> Sent: Thursday, 2 September 2004 11:45 AM
> To: IETF MARID WG
> Subject: Re: DEPLOY: A personal take on the IPR topic
> 
> 
> Since I wrote the implementation in order to help out with 
> the spam/forgery problem, it is important to me to have this 
> implementation distributed far and wide.  It is also 
> important for me to run my own code.
> 
> I do not believe that the current SenderID license will be 
> accepted by most Linux and *BSD distributions and code 
> requiring that license
> has been done by others to get this SPF implementation into 
> various distributions and patches written for most MTAs.
> 
> It I believe that it would therefore be counter productive to 
> develope or deploy SenderID.  I believe that this will likely 
> slow the deployment by many others.
> 
> 
> 
> -wayne
> 
> 
>