If I remember correctly, two patent issues were in the air at the time.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the companies involved.
1) A patent involving compressing records individually, rather than a
single compression stream for the communication (or was it vice-versa?).
2) A patent which covered compressing and encrypting (or encrypting while
compressing, or something).
I'm sure that with investigation, either of these could have been researched
and disposed of and/or worked around, but the basic fact was that noone
really cared enough about compression at the time to invest the effort.
Given that the spec was designed in such a way as to allow us to put the
issue off, that inevitably occured.
- Tim
Tim Dierks
VP of Engineering, Certicom
tdierks(_at_)certicom(_dot_)com
510.780.5409 [Hayward] -- 905.501.3791 [Mississauga]
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
[mailto:owner-ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org]On
Behalf Of EKR
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 1999 4:01 PM
To: Peter Gutmann
Cc: ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Compressed data type for S/MIME
pgut001(_at_)cs(_dot_)aucKland(_dot_)ac(_dot_)nz (Peter Gutmann) writes:
This seems a bit odd, given that a completely unencumbered
algorithm and free
implementation existed years before the web (let alone SSL)
did. There are
problems with ITU and ISO-standarised algorithms (which seem to
exist solely
to provide patent licensing outlets for vendors, and which in
any case tend to
have mediocre performance), but Zip/zlib has never had any problems
I'm quite aware that there are a number of free implementations of
compression and that the authors claim that those implementations are
enencumbered, however, discussions with holders of the various
patents (Hi/Fn comes to mind) seem to indicate that they feel
otherwise.
-Ekr
--
[Eric Rescorla ekr(_at_)rtfm(_dot_)com]
PureTLS - free SSLv3/TLS software for Java
http://www.rtfm.com/puretls/