MS Releases License For Sender-ID

NW writes "Microsoft published today a new license and FAQ for Sender-ID anti-spam standard being developed by the IETF's MARID WG (based on SPF). To use the license, a signed agreement with MSFT is required. Compatability with the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the GPL/LGPL licenses is already in question."

Comments

Where will this lead?

[ravenspear]

How long will it be before you have to have a signed agreement with Microsoft to send an email?

Are they purposely shooting their foot?

[chrispyman]

Seriously, does Microsoft think that highly of themselves that they can dictate a standard that requires a license from them? Sure they have a majority of the OS and E-mail clients, but I doubt they have a majority of the Mail Servers out there.

Current Climate...

[Manip]

In the current climate you could never produce a HTTP/SMTP type protocol because everyone is out to make money and gain power. What Microsoft has done is take a relatively open protocol and slapped a 'Microsoft Property' sticker on it, this will effectively limit its usefulness even if they are not charging a penny.

What is stopping them from letting it catch on and then asking for $1 from each project?

Re:Current Climate...

[perlchild]

Their word, it's not worth much, but it's there.

In the future, I'd recommend the IETF just make sure any standards it endorses includes a poison pill for would-be patenters contributing to standards, that if it changes the rights of patentees in the future, after it's become a standard, to restrict them in any discriminatory way, that it must pay the cost of developing the next, non-compatible(yet non-infringing on the patent) standard.

Let's face it, IBM wouldn't write compatible technology, because they'd have to cross-license their patents to Microsoft in order to get it, but neither can IBM afford to have a product that's incompatible with an IETF standard.

I'm all for rewarding the developer of a technology for doing useful work, I'm all against technologies being discovered useful only once the dollar signs come in. I'm pretty sure the IETF's stance on patents is due to the fact that it has to standardize what are often de-facto standards, picked by market effects to be the best technology. Now Microsoft is abusing the process, in order to use the IETF as a marketing weapon against its competitors.

Now my opinion is that patents and standards are exact opposites, and if you want a patent, you should just stay away from standard bodies until your patent runs out, and they should stay away from you. The patent owner and the standards body just have opposite goals:

The standards body wants to reduce the work and costs involved in increasing the number and likely hood of people using best practices and technologies, by agreeing on them and publicising them. In the knowledge fields, a standard has the force of law, simply because knowledge of a best practice being a best practice, means any other way of doing things has to be justified. The best practice is simply, better. The patent owner wants to make a maximal profit out of whatever use of his technology. That means those who compete with the patent owner cannot use the technology without the patent owner not having what he wants. The difference is fundamental, and a conciliatory position by Microsoft, as generous as it may be, is suspicious, simply because it's against their own interest

Well with the possible exception of removing "random" spam would allow them to become the only source of email advertising for their hotmail users, but in this case, their interest it would be magnified if they can deny it to _someone_, say aol, who would be denied from licensing the patent without some counterpart being presented to Microsoft. Can they exclude AOL reasonably without being discriminatory, I wonder, since IANAL, but I can certainly see their advantage in doing so.

Re:MS FAQ regarding issue

[VValdo]

A3: In order to promote Sender ID, Microsoft is pleased to offer its necessary Sender ID patent
rights on a royalty-free basis but only to those who are also willing to make their Sender ID
patents available on a reciprocal royalty-free basis.

Gee, sounds almost viral to me.

W

Re:MS FAQ regarding issue

[ePhil_One]

In order to promote Sender ID, Microsoft is pleased to offer its necessary Sender ID patent rights on a royalty-free basis but only to those who are also willing to make their Sender ID patents available on a reciprocal royalty-free basis.

Has anyone looked at the actual license to ensure that the patent reciprosity is limited only to Sender-ID? This thing could be a hell of a submarine patent reciprosity agreement, freeing MS to violate patents of anyone using email if it was worded carefully enough

Where Sender ID fits into the picture

[jgardn]

Just to get everyone up to speed:

- SPF (http://spf.pobox.com) is the current email authentication protocol that is dominating the world.

- Microsoft proposed Caller ID which was never accepted by the community.

- Microsoft and SPF advocate Meng Weng Wong brokered a deal and formed Sender ID. Basically, SPF is intact, but some features of Caller ID are preserved as an optional extension.

The part of Caller ID that remains is the PRA or "Purported Responsible Authority". The PRA is deteremined by a complicated algorithm that I personally don't believe would work. The algorithm is intentionally vague in some areas, and the results are ultimately subjective. The intention of the PRA algorithm is to determine who wrote the email based on the email headers. As everyone knows, the email headers are spoofable. But the idea goes, if you can track down the PRA, then you can authenticate this email based on that, rather than just the last hop like SPF does.

The problem from day one has been the patent issue. Microsoft is in the process of patenting the PRA algorithm. This isn't a problem. The problem is that Microsoft refuses to put the patent in the public domain or license the patent such that anyone can use it except those who use patents against Microsoft. Both of those strategies are perfectly reasonable, and are pretty much what IBM does for most of its patents.

Microsoft originally wanted to get a copy of the software and a signature before they would grant a license. Well, that doesn't work for F/OSS. The MARID working group who is investigating various solutions to the email authentication protocol for the IETF has been petitioning Microsoft to revise or clarify their licensing procedure. Well, they finally have, and in so doing they have not made it F/OSS compatible.

Microsoft thinks they can bully us around, but they don't realize they are the small kid on the email block. Their Caller ID failed. Now Sender ID is going to fail because Microsoft refuses to participate.

But that's okay. The PRA algorithm isn't anything we'll need to solve the email authentication problem.

IETF Global Perspective

[toxic666]

As long as the IETF maintains a global perspective, it can not accept standards encumbered by IP more restrictive than the GPL. It seems obvious -- we've all benefited by open standards on the Internet. But who knows, stranger things have happened.

This could be a good test case. MS may continue to pursue its IP Holy Grail business model, but if the IETF can stand firm and refuse restrictive licensing, they will not be able to force it down the world's throat. On the other hand, if the IETF does accept these kinds of IP restrictions, MS may have a path forward in pursuing its new business model of patents and copyrights for obvious and trivial ideas.

MS are hoarding patents?

[Halcyon-X]

In order to promote Sender ID, Microsoft is pleased to offer its necessary Sender ID patent rights on a royalty-free basis but only to those who are also willing to make their Sender ID patents available on a reciprocal royalty-free basis.

So everyone shares their patents with MS, but not with each other, MS gets all patent rights, and everyone else has to fend for themselves? Where is the strategic advantage for everyone to jump on board exactly?

Stalemate

[Performer Guy]

So now nobody will implement this, and Microsoft, through patenting something obvious and trying to license it has scared everyone away from some pretty good ideas that would have been implemented otherwise, with or without Microsoft's help.

This is just the latest chapter in IP stupidity.

This stuff has been discussed for years, if this had been treated like most other W3C standards we'd be in the clear by now waiting for implementations, instead everyone's scared. Does anyone realistically think that there aren't patents that W3C standards already infringe? Finally we actually get rights to something and we're inspecting the teeth, simply because the subject has been raised.

The crazy part of this whole deal is that most software is riddled with potential patent violations, including Microsoft's and including projects like Mozilla, Gimp and Open Office. That's why MS are trying to retain *defensive* rights, because they know it would be dangerous to give this IP away, anyone could stand on their shoulders, and a widget and then sue them (and that has happened already) and Microsoft would have no way of countering. If they adopted a more GPL oriented license with the rights being rescinded in the event of any patent suit against M$ it would be golden. They could just do to the protagonists what IBM has just done to SCO, infact that wording is almost already in the GPL.

I think this situation can be salvaged with another revision of the license. We should not give up on this or go for the second best option on such an improtant proposal.

We're getting to witness what the beginning of the web would have been like had Tim Bernards Lee patented some of his ideas. It ain't going to be pretty.

Microsoft doesn't get it

[dekeji]

Microsoft is apparently trying to play hard-ball with OSS developers, forcing them to accept some kind of licensing terms or forcing them to stop developing this kind of software. But OSS developers don't have a choice: there simply is no way under which OSS developers can give in to Microsoft's licensing terms, even if they wanted to, since the terms are just fundamentally incompatible with most OSS licenses.

Furthermore, going to IETF with such standards proposals is pointless: the only producers of software that count in this space are Microsoft and OSS. If IETF starts producing standards under terms that are not acceptable to OSS developers, then that just makes the IETF irrelevant but it won't help with adoption of a solution.

In this case, if IETF's SPF standard isn't 100% compatible with OSS licenses, OSS software will not incorporate it and Microsoft Exchange installations will be unable to use IETF SPF with a significant fraction of Internet hosts. If Microsoft were competing with a commercial vendor of mail server software, that vendor would be in deep trouble and it might induce that vendor to come crawling to Microsoft begging for a license. But OSS developers won't do that: OSS projects don't have the same kinds of short-term pressures on them as commercial software vendors, and even if they wanted to give in, OSS licenses make it impossible.

Microsoft's management just doesn't seem to understand that they are not dealing with another business anymore: the strategies that they have used against commercial competitors just don't work against OSS. All they are accomplishing with this sort of behavior is to taint their own credibility and the credibility of the standards bodies they get involved.