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Re: Microsoft :-) Sender-ID Licence



On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 01:54:16PM +0100,
 Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote 
 a message of 60 lines which said:

> On the other hand, I can't imagine how MS could have any valid
> patents on such a simple thing. So it's quite possible that the
> whole thing is a load of bull.

It is clearly the crux of the problem. If the licence is unacceptable
(many people think it is), what the IETF should do?

1) Go ahead and ignore what is probably a futile patent (like patents
on hypertext or on encoding of a session ID in the URL). Problem: many
implementors will fear to proceed in such an uncertain situation.

2) Drop everything which has a claim (not even a granted patent) on
it. Problem: big companies owners like Microsoft therefore have a veto
on what the IETF can standardize or not.

> And it's a bloody PDF.

Keep cool, it could have been a MS-Word. (apt-get install xpdf &&
pdftotext SenderID_License-Agreement.pdf)



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