Wayne wisely re-quoted a day or two ago
This all gets back to what Shevek said: "Implementors are not
lawyers,
and generally have better things to do with their time."
I suggest the appropriate role for IETF is to examine the
technical standards issues, and make a call on that, if necessary
with a "subject to clarification of licensing" condition.
There is an issue: neither MARID nor IETF (nor Microsoft nor the
SPF mailing list)are appropriate forums to clarify and decide on
legal issues. There is a further issue: a serious and detailed
implementation and change management plan is essential to the
success of any standard in this area - again, we are dealing with
matters that are mostly outside of the range of expertise of the
MARID list. Once a technical standard and a consensus on
technical direction are achieved, unless some other skills sets
are brought to bear on the problem the work won't be very
fruitful.
The last thing you need is a bunch of lawyers and change
management specialists reading this list and arriving at
consensus before you do anything. I'd suggest get the technical
call right,and then look to an alliance of some sort to clarify
the issues that are outside of IETF's scope and expertise.
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
IANAL. It is my understanding that several lawyers from the OSS
community (the FSF and OSI) are working with lawyers from MS,
but I do
not know what has resulted from those discussions.
I have every reason to believe that folks like Harry, Jim and
Bob have
the best of intentions to try and get a license that is
acceptable to
all parties. Unfortunately, we all know what road is paved
with good
intentions. The hell I want to avoid is having this WG end up
with an
RFC that can not be easily uses by parts of the SMTP community,
in
this case, open source MTAs/spamfilters.
Again, as Shevek said: "I believe that a large part of the
reason for the success of the GPL, BSD or Apache licenses is
that the
rights of the user and developer are particularly well
understood in
those cases. It's frequently simpler to pick a GPL'd package
than to
understand the license of a (possibly better) package under a
custom
license."
(snip)
As RFC3668 says:
In general, IETF working groups prefer technologies with no
known
IPR
claims or, for technologies with claims against them, an
offer of
royalty-free licensing. But IETF working groups have the
discretion
to adopt technology with a commitment of fair and
non-discriminatory
terms, or even with no licensing commitment, if they feel
that this
technology is superior enough to alternatives with fewer IPR
claims
or free licensing to outweigh the potential cost of the
licenses.
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
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ietf-mxcomp(_at_)mail(_dot_)imc(_dot_)org
[mailto:owner-ietf-mxcomp(_at_)mail(_dot_)imc(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of John
Glube
Sent: Monday, 19 July 2004 6:23 AM
To: 'Harry Katz'; mxcomp(_at_)brycer(_dot_)com; ietf-mxcomp(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: The licensing issue
On Sunday, July 18, 2004, Harry Katz wrote:
[edit]
"Let me just say at this point that our intent is to
contribute our IP to this working group and to encourage
widespread implementation and adoption."