Sender ID Finds Followers Ahead of Approval Recent Sender ID Summit a Success Jim Wagner
Recent Sender ID Summit a Success
Also, plenty of software vendors in the e-mail sector are making plans to implement the Sender ID specification following a Sender ID summit, which Microsoft hosted Tuesday. The goal: to educate ISPs, Web site hosters, and anti-spam/anti-phishing vendors on Sender ID deployments in their own organization.
Anderson said the summit was a success, with many ISPs making plans to incorporate Sender ID in the coming months. He expects 50 percent of the world's e-mail senders will have the specification in place by year's end.
"We believe the current license is generally incompatible with open source, contrary to the practice of open Internet standards, and specifically incompatible with the Apache License 2.0. Therefore, we will not implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms."
Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University and who provides free legal advice to the Free Software Foundation, is also taking issue with Microsoft's free licensing terms in a post to a MARID discussion list.
"The license posted by Microsoft is not compatible with GPL and is not a free software compatible license. There are several problems, of which the
most severe is the requirement that anyone who wants to redistribute a covered implementation must execute a license with Microsoft," according to a post attributed to Moglen. "If you cannot give people code that they can redistribute without permission, you are not giving them free software. This would be the conclusion under all the meta-definitions of freedom: the
[Open Source Definition], the [Free Software Definition], and the Debian
[Free Standards Group]." (Moglen did not respond to requests for further comment.)
Microsoft's Sundwall said he doesn't understand why the open source community is balking at the license agreement, which is in many ways similar
to the terms found in software companies like IBM, a company with tens of thousands of intellectual property (IP) patents that routinely donates code to the open source community.
"It's a very standard procedure; IBM and many others that have a foundation on IP submit specs to the IETF and other standard's bodies with IP claims all the time," he said. "It's a little baffling why this issue in particular has gotten so much attention because our intentions are 100 percent pure; we have a pretty good track record on spam and how we've made an effort to make no money to solve this for our customers and anyone else's customers as well.
"We have never and will never charge any money whatsoever for this patent," he said. "The patent, which has not been granted yet, was filed mostly as a defensive measure down the road should people come back at us and file an IP-based lawsuit."
