On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 11:34:48AM -0700, Harry Katz wrote:
Mark, if there's a specific part of the license you'd like clarified,
I'd encourage you to send mail to stdsreq(_at_)microsoft(_dot_)com(_dot_)
Someone from
our legal department will answer your question.
I appreciate the offer of assistance Harry, and probably will take
advantage of it. However, I can't in good conscience base my decisions
on the advice of your legal team, as it isn't a disinterested party.
Since I can't afford to pay a lawyer to consult with me on the matter, I
think the best approach will be to sit back and watch to see how things
play out once others have deployed open-source projects supporting
Sender-ID, and once the patent filings have become public knowledge. In
particular, I'm concerned about the potential leverage agreeing to the
license terms gives the IP holders against those who implement both
Sender-ID and SPF simultaneously. It's not clear to me whether the IP
holder would pursue as infringing those who implement SPF.
I also concur with another poster's statement: having to submit a
paper agreement to the IP holder is, in my opinion, burdensome.
The very short version of all this is: if I feel I need to consult a
lawyer before integrating this into my software, I'm just not going to
implement it.
--
Mark C. Langston GOSSiP Project Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark(_at_)bitshift(_dot_)org http://sufficiently-advanced.net
mark(_at_)seti(_dot_)org
Systems & Network Admin Distributed SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org E-mail Reputation http://www.seti.org