Hello there,
On Thu Jul 01 2004, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
I've been working with a number of OS lawyer folks who have
generously donated their time and expertise to review the
license. We are still working to reach consensus on just
what is acceptable and what is not; however, on the
Microsoft side, George Webb has shown a great willingness to
make things palatable for the open community.
Of course, the devil is in the details. I hope to be able
to provide a better summary of what's going on.
I think we just need to do a conference call with Microsoft
and reach some agreement on where we want to go with all
this.
[Reggie B. :]
| I hope that the nasty license has been removed so that I can recommend
| people use the new, merged technology.
Patent licenses are nasty ... we hates them, yes we do.
I discovered this morning to my great disappointment, by following some links
on the http://spf.pobox.com/rfcs.html page, that SPF and Microsoft Caller-ID
were merging into a new project called "Sender
ID" (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/privacy/spam_senderid.mspx), and
that this new project, described here :
http://spf.pobox.com/draft-ietf-marid-protocol-00.txt seems to be nothing
else than SPF, plus a provision for a new DNS RR type, minus the
specification of the "Received-SPF:" header.
Microsoft has announced here :
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/jun04/06-24SIDSpecIETFPR.asp
that an agreement has been passed about this merger between Microsoft and
Meng Weng Wong on June 24, but I was suprised to see that the SPF news page
at http://spf.pobox.com/news.html doesn't say a word about this, even though
it talks about more recent events.
The Microsoft page about "Sender ID",
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/privacy/spam_senderid.mspx says that the
implementation of "Sender ID" in software is governed by a "royalty-free"
license wich actually is the license for "Caller-ID", and this license :
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/0/a/60a02573-3c00-4ee1-856b-afa39c020a95/callerid_license.pdf
is clearly incompatible with incorporating "Sender ID" into Free Sotware, as
this license includes restrictions and obligations that are incompatible with
Free Sotware licenses (for example the GPL).
Does SPF really belong to Microsoft from now on ? Is the implementation of SPF
in software now governed by a MS License ? If yes, I would of course
immediately quit using it.
Or did I completely misunderstand the whole thing ?
Any comments ?
Best regards.
--
Michel Bouissou <michel(_at_)bouissou(_dot_)net> OpenPGP ID 0xDDE8AC6E