On Thu, 3 Jun 2005, John Levine wrote:
Also, I don't understand what you mean by open source here.
Fully open standard spec is perhaps more appropriate (not good as name
goes though). If you have a spec that some large entity controls (with
trademark, patent and license to use it) then making any changes and
improvements to it would be very difficult as they could effectively
block them if they want to and not allow license for anything similar
or for modified version of original spec, etc.
And I think you understood me the first time anyway, you just have your
own personal reasons to support DK and nothing else and don't want to
look at and compare alternatives - even if those alternatives are basically
the same underlying technology, just less constrained implementation not
bound to necessarily fit within specific patent. For example if we take DK
spec and change it from retrieving public key to retrieving fingerprints
for verification (with public key included in the message), would that
seriously change your view on if this technology itself is working?
Yahoo has
published multiple versions of its draft spec, they've offered an open
source compatible patent license,
Well, Microsoft supposedly also offered "open source compatible patent
license", we all know what that meant and what it turned into!
So really "open source compatible" is just too open an name and has
been misused by corporate guys. The question for Yahoo should be if
their license is compatible with programs licensed under GPL?
Positive answer would guarantee its compatible with every other
open-source license that I know of. Negative would adversely effect
technology adaption and would mean (in my view) its not suitable for
standardization.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net