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DEPLOY: A personal take on the IPR topic

2004-09-01 14:42:13

As the chairs have asked for information about personal deployment, I wanted to share my view on the topic of IPR:

In light of the license terms, I will not be coding any implementation of the portions of SenderID that are covered by the IPR claim.

I do not come to this conclusion lightly, or happily. It took quite some time to read and digest the Microsoft IPR license, and to consider the review by open source lawyers that I respect (specifically Larry Rosen and Eben Moglen).

All my computer work these days is for free. And, as I don't work on mail code that will have direct end-users, all my work in this area is for inclusion in yet other projects. Hence, anything I wrote for SenderID would require a new license by anyone who choose to incorporate my work. I do not wish to encumber my work this way.

I do support SenderID, and hope the current set of drafts (or something close) will be promoted by this working group. I am also glad that others will undertake to write free software (in the general sense) that will implement it within the bounds of the license. I will, as an end-user, run such software on my servers.

I will continue to work on the protocol aspects of SenderID, since these are not covered by the IPR. I will continue to edit the draft as co-author, and will continue work on various implementations of it (such as record parsers and generators.)

        - Mark

Mark Lentczner
http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/
markl(_at_)glyphic(_dot_)com


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