On Tuesday, August 24, 2004 11:52 AM, wayne wrote:
2) Not all licenses are equal. For example, Cisco's patent license on
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/cisco-ipr-draft-fenton-identified-mail-00.t
xt
seems *much* more reasonable to me than MS's license for SenderID.
(In particular, requiring a signed license for source code
distributions is very burdensome.)
Please read the document at the above link carefully. It is NOT a
patent license, it is a statement about Cisco's IPR. In fact that's
what the title says it is.
In this statement, Cisco has not provided a license. Cisco has agreed
to offer a license. That offer to license is conditioned on the
following:
1. the technology is included in the IETF spec
2. the IETF spec is adopted as a "standard" - see highlighted portion
below.
Cisco has also indicated that it's license will include reciprocity and
defensive terms.
Cisco is of course entitled to offer a license under whatever terms and
at whatever time it deems appropriate.
I would just point out by way of comparison that Microsoft has made an
"actual" license available with reference to the existing IETF spec
irrespective of whether or not the IETF adopts it as a "standard". Many
IETF specs do not actually get adopted as an IETF standard. Microsoft
is not taking any position as to whether or not Cisco would make such a
license available to early implementers but rather to clarify that
Microsoft has taken the unusual step of doing so.