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OSI And Microsoft Negotiating Over Sender ID
ValourX writes "Microsoft's Sender ID has already been rejected by both the Debian Project and the Apache Software Foundation, but Joe Barr of NewsForge today interviewed Larry Rosen of the Open Source Initiative and discovered that there are negotiations between the two entities with regard to Sender ID's licensing. Could Microsoft be considering an Open Source license for Sender ID? Slashdot has covered other aspects of this story in the past. NewsForge is part of OSTG, like Slashdot."
Never ceases to amaze me that a company like Microsoft which defends it's intellectual property to the death, just expects other company's to surrend their intellectual property.
How about radio stations patent thier playlists? Make as much sense as MS patents, maybe more.
you've got at point that at less than $0.0025 USD it would save me and my employer money it still doesn't add in the time that a pay system would take to use. At 1 minute a day, which is probably high for me with spam filtering, I'm spending less than $0.25 per day verifying that I haven't miss filtered a valid message as spam. Now assuming I send 10 messages a day(probably low) that's $0.025 USD, figure a 30 day month average, that works out to $0.75 USD which isn't too bad until you figure the time to pay the bill and verify that I'm not getting overbilled like my cell does almost every month. Checking my "email bill" means looking at roughly 300 entries, at 10 per day, to make sure everything is correct then signing off on it and passing it on to the business office. Now I'm pulling most of the numbers out of my ass but accepting them for the argument it'd come out to almost the same amount to money spent for me and my employer as what I've got now and it's a lot more hassle. OTOH if you cut that figure by an order of magnititude to $0.00025 it's beyond the realm of normal micro-payments and the the administration costs for me to deal with the problems generated by it(it's a given that any system more complex than currently in use will take more time to adminisiter than the current one which has has a few decades to mature). anyway my point is that even using some sort of micro-payment system doesn't really make sense as a system to simply get rid of spam. To be perfectly honest I can't think of a good reason to use any sort of payment system for email, especially not when the cost of bandwidth is dropping(which is the trend). just think of what would happen to a knowledge workers productivity if they had to pay(even micro) for google. in the long run it simply doesn't work out.
:)
As a counter point to all of this, I'm aware of a number(>3 that I personally know) that have totally dropped off the net because of spam problems. these people were getting in excess of 4000 spams a day and had no idea how to deal with it(change isp?) and it totally destroyed their email capabilities(outlook express or aol) when using a dial-up connection.
Finally, I'd say go for it if Microsoft wants to give a reasonable liscence to *all* free software,GPL included, it'd benefit them too, and regardless of what the zealots say, hey I use linux everywhere i can I'm even posting this from konq on my laptop, Microsoft isn't evil, bad company maybe but not evil. They even have a clear benefit to getting OSS/FS to adopt their standard, marketing. I can see the ads now, mentioning inovation and microsoft setting the standards and all. Hey they'd be getting the world(OSS) to dance to their tune and they are looking for a break like that...
--any spelling or grammar nazi's can blame captian morgan for problems in this post
bash$ :(){ :|:&};:
i like your little forkbomb. it crashed my xp machine (with cygwin). well done.