On Fri, 28 May 2004, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
The question of patents and licensing has been one of the
many lightning rods surrounding the SPF/CallerID merger.
George Webb at Microsoft will meet with the MS attorneys
next week. He has asked for our input.
I don't know how fesable this proposal would be, but it would solve the
issue for SPF and open the way to solving this kind of problem when it crops
up in the future.
Essentialy:
Start a new company as an ip-rights holding company for tech companies who
have particular IP rights that they have obtained to protect themselves,
and where the rights apply to open standards.
Split ownership of the company between Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Cisco, Google,
the FSF, the OSI, and O'Reilly (at least), work googles "Do No Evil" stuff
into the company charter.
Now when something like the current SPF issue comes up, the IP can be
transfered to the holding company, and the origonal holder can then be sure
that they are still protected, and the rest of us can rest easy knowing that
the origonal holder can't change there maid at a later date and start
demanding licenseing fees.
This would help with the Cisco VRRP thing too, I'm sure there other similar
issues that people can think of.
The whole issue of IP-Rights and Open standards is going to continue to be a
problem for the forseable future, Microsoft stands to gain considerably
kudos from the larger deveopler community by doing something like this.
Oh course the devil is in the details with this kind of thing, and with
very limited legal expirence i've no idea how it might work in practice.
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