Re: (DEPLOY) In Support of Sender ID

J. Trevor Hughes wrote:
> Based on our review, the license terms have been deemed acceptable.  The 
> fact that pending patent claims are present is nothing new to the IETF.  
> Many RFCs have gone forward with IPR claims.  The issue should then 
> distill to whether the license presented is consistent with IETF 
> standards.  I believe that Microsoft has complied with, and indeed 
> exceeded, the standards.  The IETF has been notified of the IPR claims 
> and royalty-free, non-discriminatory license terms have been offered.  
> What more is required?
>  
You are making a mistake. The main question the IETF considers in 
regards to the IPR is not "whether the license presented is consistent 
with IETF standards". It is rather described in section 5.3 of RFC 3669:
"  The issue is not whether a particular piece of
   technology is IPR-impacted -- we use IPR-impacted technology every
   minute.  The question is how much the IPR protection will limit the
   technology's usefulness in building a robust, highly useful Internet.
"

In this specific case, even though Microsoft may have satisfied the 
letter of the law so to speak, that might not be good enough. If the IPR 
protection will hinder deployment that "will limit the technology's 
usefulness". That is the main question and unfortunatly, the licensing 
as it stands now presents a significant deployment barrier to a sizable 
portion of the Internet community.
I urge you to reread RFCs 2026, 3667, 3668 and 3669.

>  
>
> Even more has been said about the sub-licensing of Sender ID.  While I 
> do acknowledge the concerns of many on this list, we feel that the 
> friction caused by sub-licensing is a worthwhile quid pro quo for the 
> greater value of broad implementation of an authenticated email 
> solution.  Again, any attorney acting as counsel for a corporation would 
> seek such terms.  They are neither surprising, nor objectionable.
If it hinders deployment, it is a problem even if it is "neither 
surprising, nor objectionable". I think that is the point that is hard 
to hammer through here - this is not a regular standard, and it requires 
much more committment and different handling, than anything any 
corporate lawyers have done before.
> I do want to raise one issue that has not been discussed on MARID yet 
> (at least as far as I have seen).  The eyes of the world are upon 
> industry at this time and great expectations have been created for 
> authenticated email technologies to emerge quickly and broadly.  The 
> Federal Trade Commission recently issued a report to Congress and 
> strongly advocated for authenticated email solutions.  They will be 
> holding a workshop on the topic later this fall.  Failure to move 
> forward with Sender ID at this juncture will likely put us back at least 
> 6 months and perhaps more.  Such a delay will only invite interference 
> from legislators and regulators.  I certainly do not think that is in 
> the best interests on anyone!
At this point its a catch-22. Not approving the standard will cause 
problem. But you should also take into account that *approving* it will 
cause problems as well. Deployment of this standard will not happen 
until both the commercial and FOSS sides have been satisfied. As much as 
some of us may hate it, but this is one area where the commercial world 
and the FOSS *must* work together.
Approval of the standard on the MARID WG level means nothing. The final 
approval rests with the IESG and that will still take time.  Any kind of 
approval or lack of therefore, will cause further friction among the 
parties, including possible appeals to the IESG and IAB.
It might come hard to believe to the commercial world, but the role FOSS 
software plays in the Internet architechture is larger than any other 
area today. Majority of the architechture is built on FOSS such as BIND, 
Apache, sendmail, etc. You cannot simply ignore it and hope it will go 
away. Both commercial and FOSS sides *must* be willing to negotiate on 
this issue, and work on this together. Otherwise, even if this standard 
is approved, and not deployed, it would be useless. And then the 
senators will jump in anyway.
Yakov