Daniel Quinlan wrote:
Andrew Newton <andy(_at_)hxr(_dot_)us> writes:
Second, it does not make sense to discuss alternatives to PRA if those
alternatives may be reasonably inferred to be covered by the patent
application (though not necessarily the license) since this working
group does not wish to discount Microsoft's patent application.
identify the party most recently responsible for injecting the message.
For example, I believe the "fetchmail" alternative is:
a. possibly not encumbered by the Microsoft patent(s) and we could find
out from Microsoft upon publication of the specification
b. more likely to result in an invalidated patent *if* the patent
application also covers the algorithm due to prior art
Then, would it not be a good idea to encourge the workgroup to begin
work on additional scopes in parallel with the other scopes? At worst,
we would decide they were no less encumbered than PRA, but *both* (a)
and (b) would have to go against them for that to be the case.
[...]
This would seem to at least exclude any scopes that use 2822 headers to
I'm really confused as to why you think that's true. I think my
reasoning is sound, can you explain why the chairs think a parallel
effort on additional "backup" scopes (which has been suggested by more
than a few people) should be ruled out? I don't want to delay the
initial release of a "mailfrom" scope, but I also don't think we should
wait to work on "fetchmail" (or whatever) and "helo" until after the
others are done. By waiting, I think we might paint ourselves into a
corner where the entire specification is rejected because only
"mailfrom" is deemed interoperable by the email community as a whole and
the "pra" scope is too much of a de-facto requirement.
We can always ask Microsoft as has been done with MAILFROM. We can ask
Harry whether Wayne´s current draft falls under the IPR claims, and the
fetchmail algorithm. If there is a definitive negative, than we are in
the clear.
Yakov