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[spf-discuss] Re: MS Puts SID Patents Under Open Specification Promise

2006-10-23 23:43:52
william(at)elan.net wrote:

what would that mean if we release new document for new version
of SPF standard?

There's no clear "we" in the process of creating 4408bis drafts,
it's a wild mixture including the authors of such drafts, the
authors of 4408, a sponsoring IETF AD, IESG procedures, an IETF
last call, statements by the SPF council, etc.

You say "standard".  AFAIK the only existing SPF standard is what
the SPF council identified as SPF standard, an IETF "experiment"
published in RFC 4408 (+ errata).

This promise applies to all existing versions of the following
specifications:

Notice again the use of "existing versions" - see my comment above

In other words it covers also implementations based on the drafts
published before the relevant RFCs.  Their "promise" is a legal
statement, it can't talk about unknown future specifications

By listing SPF document among the SID documents that rely on PRA
they in a way claim that they have some patent rights that may
apply to it

We (TINW) know that this isn't the case for 4408.  And as far as
I'm concerned it also isn't the case for 4407, that's merely a
nice excerpt from 2822 stating the obvious way how to interpret
some mail header fields if there's no Return-Path.

Their list IMO says "whatever rights we might have in 4405...4408,
anybody is free to use these specifications as (s)he sees fit, as
far as we (= MS) are concerned."

We may end up discussing this again if there appears to be
support for certain action from SPF community in general.

You could welcome their statement on behalf of the SPF community,
pointing out that SPF was of course never affected by their prior
legalese, alive and kicking, current activities in the field like
the test suite, oo

Frank


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