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FSF & OSI Speak out Against Sender-ID License

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-there's-no-surprise-here dept.

NW writes "As a followup to yesterday story, Eben Moglen of FSF and Larry Rosen of OSI have publically spoken out against Microsoft's Sender-ID license calling it incompatible with the GPL and Open Source. A related eWeek story also covers this and includes the following quote from Eric Allman, the author of Sendmail: "It's pretty clear that it's going to take an act of whatever deity Microsoft worships in order to get them to back down on the sublicensing issue. They made it absolutely clear to us that they were not even going to consider changing this, and the legal folks made it further clear that they would rather see Sender ID die than back down.""

7 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fine by me. by phraktyl · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, I think your sig says it all:

    And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
    To mold a new reality ... closer to the heart

    The FSF/OSI communities are doing as much as we can, but as much as I hate to say it, things aren't fundamentally going to change until the big companies -- to include Microsoft -- do.

    Great Rush quote, BTW.

    --
    Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
  2. Act of... by warrendodge · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "going to take an act of whatever deity Microsoft worships in order to get them to back down"

    That would be an act of Dollar, the almighty god of commerce. Worshiped by by corporations and monopolists around the world.

  3. Re:Fight back by Bastian · · Score: 2, Interesting



    I wonder how feasible it would be for Free Software to fight back by embrace and extending some ubiquitious and vital technology the way Microsoft hs tried with e-mail and the Web, getting a patent on it, and then licensing it under some GPL-like license?

    Sadly (for some, at least), this would be a strike at business in general, and I'm not sure everyone would want to attack an entire industry based on the actions of a few unruly members, and open source probably isn't big enough to do it to the entire industry. Personally, I'd just make a commercial licensing option that is more BSD-like for some vendors with a specific "No Microsoft" clause.

    It'd be fun to see what happens to Microsoft if we could effectively make it impossible to provide some service from Windows servers. Maybe actually bring competition back to the market.

    </knee-jerk>

  4. Re:Fine by me. by Piquan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, really, what's Blackbird?

    I'm not sure if you were just joking or really asking a question.

    Blackbird was the protocol used by MSN. I'm not sure about the technical details, but I think it was pretty much sending GDI calls (Windows equiv to X calls) down the wire. Microsoft derided HTML in favor of Blackbird.

    About a year after that, they were enthusiastically "supporting" HTML.

  5. Re:Fight back by molo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wouldn't expect to see MS modifying and sharing any GPL code anytime soon, but they have used BSD code in the past, and I have no doubt they do use binaries of GPL'd projects (but would naturally avoid tainting themselves by looking, let along modifying, sources).

    They already distribute GPL licensed code. See Windows Services for UNIX 3.5. It includes gcc, g++, make, rcs, awk, grep, sed, tar, cpio, etc.

    -molo

    --
    Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
  6. Re:Fine by me. by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express have a huge market share. My brother, for example, uses it/them. So what am I supposed to do when my brother's email program refuses to accept my emails because I don't use the same mailer that he uses? How can I even email him to explain myself? For all I know, he won't even see that my email came in marked as "spam", he'll just wonder why I never send emails anymore.

    That's my fundimental objection to all these anti-spam kludges (and that's what they are, kludges): they only work if everyone adopts the same kludge.

    --
    If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
  7. Hotmail by Tyreth · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Sender ID has already gained market support. Both ISPs, such as AOL, and mail software and support companies, such as Cloudmark Inc. and Tumbleweed Communications Corp., have announced support for it. Microsoft has also announced that it will start using Sender ID for inbound e-mail to its hotmail.com, msn.com and microsoft.com domains in October.

    Practically speaking, what does this mean? That we won't be able to send emails to hotmail.com, msn.com and microsoft.com unless we use Sender ID enabled mail servers? What exactly does Sender ID do that will cause a problem of incompatibility for the open source community? I understand that Sendmail and others won't be able to implement it as is, but what does not being able to implement it mean?