* Eric S. Raymond: > In the last 60 days, the IETF has taken the worst blow to its > credibility that I have observed in the entire history of the > organization. I refer, of course, to the Sender-ID debacle, which > exposed IETF's inability or unwillingness to defend Internet > standards against patent predation even when the existence of > prior art is readily establishable. Are you familiar with IETF IPR policies? Microsoft's Sender ID license was a perfectly acceptable RAND patent license. The outcome of the decision is quite surprising, and underlines that even though the IETF has policies that can put free software at a disadvantage, the IETF community makes sure that these policies are not used for some of the most important protocols.[1] Regarding the existence of prior art, it's almost inevitable that Microsoft's patent claims will be narrowed significantly when the patent is granted in a few years. The exact scope of those claims is very difficult to predict, though, and so are the costs of standardizing on an infringing protocol. Maybe I'm a bit biased because I think SPF and Sender-ID are wrong from a strategic point of view. IMHO, it's a very bad idea to put DNS so close to the center of the spam wars because it's so likely that the resulting collateral damage on DNS as a whole will destabilize the domain name system as a whole, and a have a devastating side effect on the Internet. 1. Some core protocols are heavily patent-encumbered, though, or have become encumbered as implementation strategies evolved. Efficient packet forwarding is certainly one of the Internet fundamentals, however it's far from obvious how to implement it without breaking a couple of patents (similar to the situation with compression algorithms at the beginning of the 90s). _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf