review of DK and IIM patent licenses

[Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@pathname.com>]

Hi folks.

I'm seeking additional review of the Domain Keys and Internet Identified
Mail patent licenses which are cryptographic email authentication
technologies from Yahoo! and Cisco, respectively.  I believe these
licenses are much closer to allowing open source implementations, unlike
the PRA portion of the Sender ID specification.

Here is the IIM license:

  http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/cisco-ipr-draft-fenton-identified-mail-00.txt

Here is the DK license:

  http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/license/patentlicense1-0.html

At the FTC/NIST Email Authentication Summit, I met with both Yahoo! and
Cisco folks and they seem to be genuinely interested in making sure
their licenses are compatible with open source software, licenses, and
development models.  Should it be the case that the ASF, FSF, Debian,
etc. find these licenses acceptable, I think we should try to make a
joint announcement of the "we approve of these licenses" with Yahoo!,
Cisco, or both.

I also briefly met with Ryan Hamlin, the GM of Microsoft's Safety
Technology & Strategy group, and he's interested in attempting a second
try at the patent license negotiation between us (well, Larry Rosen) and
a more senior attorney at Microsoft.  So, it may not be entirely
hopeless that Sender ID be entirely usable by open source.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Quinlan                     ApacheCon! 13-17 November (3 SpamAssassin
http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan/  http://www.apachecon.com/  sessions & more)