"Dick St.Peters" <stpeters(_at_)NetHeaven(_dot_)com> writes:
Nonetheless, the license excludes a lot of free-software developers.
For example, I'm a professor who also happens to work on open-source
mail software in my free time. I asked my university's lawyers
whether they could execute Microsoft's sender ID license, and the
answer was probably not. The problem is that it requires the
university to license *all* of its patents back to Microsoft for
sender ID--including patents obtained by other research groups--which
the lawyers were extremely reluctant to do.
What the license says is different from what you say your lawyers say.
The license says that if you patent something that is *necessary* to
implement Sender ID, you must allow all Sender ID licensees (including
free-software developers) to use that something for the purpose of
implementing Sender ID.
That's why I said "for Sender ID"--as in "for the purpose of Sender
ID". I dealt with people in the tech transfer office. Their job is
to license patents. I'm sure they knew what they were talking about.
Only if you want to use a patent to block other developers from
implementing Sender ID do you have reason to object to such a
provision.
*I* certainly don't want to use a patent to block Sender ID or
anything else. But I can't speak for all my present and future
colleagues. This is just how universities work--a lot of independent
research groups do different things. Some inventions get patented
some don't.
Incidentally, at the time I did this, I was at NYU, which is an
extremely open-source friendly school. (For example, if you've used
GCC 2, a lot of that code was developed at NYU.) I'm sure it would be
at least as hard to get this license executed at other universities,
though I'm not pursuing it because. For technical reasons I think SPF
can be more useful to solve spam than PRA-based authentication. (As
has been pointed out, neither solves spam on its own.)
But basically I'd be very surprised to find a legitimate Sender ID
implementation used in software written in academia. You might find
situations where just some random person had signed the license Sender
ID agreement, but not someone whose signature can legally bind the
university.
David
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