On Sat, 29 May 2004, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
If you are in a favorable market position such as Microsoft or
VeriSign enjoie s in our markets there is not a lot of value
in chasing patent royalties.
Royalties, no. However, the owner of a patent has
the right to prevent anybody else from implementing
the technology - even independant implementations.
It would be a shame if 5 years down the road Excange
was the only MTA that could legally use SPF. In order
for SPF to become widely adopted, we need to make sure
that anybody has the rights to implement SPF, without
restrictions.
The only reasonable restriction I could think of is
that you lose the right to the SPF patents if you sue
the SPF patent holder about another patent related to
SPF. Such a mutual termination clause would provide
everybody with a good reason to keep SPF open forever.
Now, about the license for the SPF software. Frankly
I couldn't care less, as long as people have the rights
to implement their own we should be fine...
Rik
--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan