Fine. And if RSA places the necessary pieces into the public domain as
promised,
S/MIME may win in which case PGP will just have to build a plug-in. Not
difficult.
And not needed. I take it you haven't been following the S/MIME working
group. None of the drafts for S/MIME v3 have mandated any proprietary
technology. The mandatory algorithms are the same as are proposed for
OpenPGP: Diffie-Hellman for key exchange and tripleDES for encryption. The
two groups are using different variants of each, but the requirements are
by and large the same.
More info on both technologies can be found at
<http://www.imc.org/smime-pgpmime.html>.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium