And some misleading statements: "To facilitate widespread
adoption, Yahoo!
and Microsoft are granting royalty-free, nonexclusive licenses to any
domain owner who wants to implement DomainKeys or Sender ID."
No mention
of Open Source, or questioning the need for patents.
I spent all Friday (and close to $5,000 on lawyers) as a witness in a
deposition concerning a patent that was applied for over ten years ago. I am
aware of at least one other pending case where I am going to be called as a
witness and it is likely that the number of cases will grow.
You may disagree with the legitimacy of software patents but until they are
abolished there is absolutely no question that it is necessary to file for a
patent if you want to use a technology without ending up in a lawsuit.
Its like vampirism or Y2K consulting (but I repeat myself), each victim
turns into a vampire and creates more vampires and as one film put it 'so
the poison SLOWLY spreads', clearly the idea of exponential growth was not
understood well at the time. The Y2K consulting vampire variant was to
require each new victim to send out demands to every supplier asking them
for their Y2K compliance accreditation.