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RE: The licensing issue

2004-07-18 16:37:42


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."




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