Debian Project Rejects Sender-ID

NW writes "Following on the heels of Apache Foundation taking a stance against Sender-ID, the Debian Project announced today their rejection of Sender-ID as well."

Restrictive Patents

[darkmeridian]

Of course patent-encumbered standards will never take. Why do companies even hope that it will? Do they remember what happened to IBM and MCA?

Re:Restrictive Patents

[benjamindees]

Although I hope you're correct, it's incredibly naive to believe so.

The truth is, proprietary 'standards' are all over the place. They are especially effective when directly-marketed to consumers, cutting out all the middle-men who might say "whoah there, that isn't a good deal" and replacing them with glossy print ads full of half-truths.

And, let's face it, Windows itself is the greatest direct-marketing tool ever created. I'm not looking forward to the direction this is going.

Re:Restrictive Patents

[Kjella]

Sure, patent restricted formats doesn't do well... like gif (now expired), mp3, mpeg2, mpeg4, wma, wmv, ttf (pixel hinting algorithm), rsa (also expired) and so on and so on. You are using one of very few examples where it was "everybody against one". Consortiums and such or companies with little competition rarely have problem introducing patented standards.

Kjella

Re:Restrictive Patents

[Froze]

Its not like image compression using LZW was ever accepted by the masses or the mp3 codecs were ever used by the majority.

All broad sweeping statements are prone to failure, including this one.

Re:Restrictive Patents

[Gentlewhisper]

"Why do companies even hope that it will?"

A corporation does not hope.
It does not have a soul.
If a corporation were made flesh and has a body, he'd be locked away as a psychopath!

Have said that, well, it is probably an calculated gamble, and why not? Just because a few losers lost doesn't mean they will all bend over and die.

Licensing = zero recurring cost price + unlimited profits.

Wonder why USA is producing nothing much nowadays? They've discovered da bomb and is trying to slug the rest of the world with it by trying to create 'compatible' laws everywhere!

The new MS Word "standard"

[mariox19]

Everybody here is no doubt familiar with the "unofficial standard" that is Microsoft Word: meaning, they have been sent Word documents or asked to send documents in Word format as if everybody used Word. Microsoft has ensured that the clueless masses default to Word's format as an Internet standard (or as an example of "best practices" -- to use the latest buzzword).

You can find examples of this in business, education, and government.

It's possible that we're going to see e-mail "evolve" in the same way. Ninety percent of e-mail flying around the Internet will use the new Sender ID standard; those not using it will seem odd and likely be forced to use it more often than not in their various business dealings.

Re:Perhaps

[Karzz1]

Perhaps there will be no adoption of sender-id; perhaps an open solution will prevail. The reason the internet works as well as it does is open standards. Perhaps these companies that are trying to encumber "standards" are slowly learning that they will not gain the acceptance of their "standards" and will have to compete on the merit of implementations of open standards rather than locking people into a "standard". This is just the newest version of proprietary file formats; unfortunately it is the only way Microsoft knows to compete anymore. Rather than compete on a level playing field, Microsoft wants to lock you into their new "standard" rather than compete on the merits of their products.

Re:Statements but little analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

In the same way that you have to wait for MS to release a security patch for software, I would guess that the patent would mean that you would have to wait for MS to change the standard if a flaw is found

IETF should get its head out of its ass

[njdj]

As the Debian statement says,
We are also concerned that no company should be permitted intellectual property rights (IPR) over core Internet infrastructure.

Seems obvious to me. Why isn't it obvious to the IETF?

Debian again: We believe the IETF needs to revamp its IPR policies to ensure that the core Internet infrastructure remain unencumbered.

Right on.

A company like Microsoft has no respect for the rights of others, no respect for ethics, no respect for the ideals of the people who built the Internet infrastructure for our benefit. I agree with Debian that no company should be permitted IP rights over core Internet infrastructure. But especially not a predatory company like Microsoft.

Re:Restrictive Patents

[darkmeridian]

You are right. But here, we are talking about an E-MAIL standard. And while free open-source software doesn't dominate the market, it does make up a strong percentage of the market. Why bother shoving a patent-encumbered format in this field? It just seems like a pointless task. You could just NOT SQUANDER your good will and just remove the patents or donate them to a not-for profit.

good on them

[auzy]

They were right to reject it. The open source world often stands together in such issues, and the only end result that could happen is a truly free standard that will take on the world. Now that issues have been raised, it means every other distro will analyse it, and probably not include it either but help work on a "free" one, and the internet in reality runs off Unix, so we have a VERY good chance of getting a strongly supported standard out there.. Very few major mail servers run off Windows, hotmail is probably the only one I'd imagine.

Just one question, has there been any work on a open standard yet?

Re:Perhaps

[whovian]

Perhaps this is where closed source vendors (read: Microsoft) will lead the adoption of Sender-ID.

The article mentions that Microsoft's Sender ID is an extension of the SPF standard. Further, "SPF/Sender-ID requires changes to DNS and MTAs in order to work. The changes to DNS involve the addition of new records which identify machines authorized to send mail for a specific domain".
I'm inferring that the internet's root DNS's have to be modified. Allowing Microsoft's "standard" on the root servers is hardly nonpartial if the open community is disagreeing so much.

A moment's pity for Microsoft, please

[ites]

Apart from the fact that Microsoft are an incredibly wealthy and successful company, they deserve a moment's silent respect for their utter failure to understand the way the IT market is evolving.

The attempt to inject patents into anti-SPAM tools is well-founded for a company that wants to find new business models, but it's incredibly offensive to the Internet community. Not just "nerds" and "fanatics" exposing some radical political viewpoint, but the hundreds of thousands of hard-working people who actually built the servers that run the web.

Technology gets ever cheaper and this inevitably destroys old markets. For the world's largest software company to _still_ earn the bulk of its money from operating systems and office suites is quite amazing. These are commodity products and only sell through brute-force tactics that are eventually self-defeating.

Microsoft should step back from trying to control essential domains such as email, and focus on what they are really good at: providing the unwashed masses with easy-to-use, pretty front-ends. It's a market with huge potential but its success depends on a reliable and expanding back-end infrastructure, exactly the domain that Microsoft is incapable of delivering.

A message to Microsoft: please understand that open source is the key to your long term survival. Embrace it, or die. Open source is the cornucopia of software technology: it will create a hundred million new software consumers, and most of these will be potential new clients.

Just produce software they actually want, not software they are forced into buying by your devious political games.

When the Internet first became popular, Bill Gates announced that the Microsoft Network would be better. He was wrong, and after a couple of years, forced Microsoft to embrace the net rather than fight it.

The same is true of open source. It's only a conflict because Microsoft is refusing to face the inevitability of the situation.

A moment's pity, therefore. They may be rich. That does not make them either smart, or right.

Mozilla?

[sbaker]

The big push here needs to be for Mozilla to refuse to support it.

We heard here yesterday that Mozilla has a far bigger market share than Debian does - and Mozilla actually does read mail and reject spam. So their refusal to participate in a Microsoft takeover of the world wide email system would have some real meaning.

It's good that Apache came out against it...what about 'sendmail'?

There also needs to be some promotion of a good alternative that's not IP-encumbered and which would hopefully have technical merits too...it's easy to refuse to support a proposed standard - but it's better to have a good reason to recommend a solid alternative.

Re:Restrictive Patents

[mindstrm]

Well, if the patent were licensed irevocably for unrestricted use by anyone for anything, then the OSS crowd wouldn't have a problem with it.

The problem is, unless it's so licensed, and despite best intentions... a patent holder can later choose to kick your ass for using his patented method, even if he let oyu use it for free for years.

Re:not possible for section 7 of the gpl

[Anonymous Coward]

taking a standard (spf) that might cut down on spam, slightly modifying it, patenting it and applying restrictions on the redistribution of the thing, hoping that such a "standard" will be adopted by those that on the internet are used to open and unencumbered specifications and standards, THAT is stupid.

Re:Critical mass needed.

[KjetilK]

As I said yesterday, I think Sender ID looks dead, unless Microsoft changes their mind. People have worked very hard on this topic. Larry Rosen worked very hard with them, and Matt Sargeant (Matts [slashdot.org] on /.) took it up with them [imc.org]. I think it looks like a case of MS not getting it.

I came across this message on Exim-users where one of the core developers flatly rejects the license [exim.org], and it also indicates the Sendmail folks feel the same. Courier has also rejected it in a similar manner.

Sender ID needs rapid adoption, and it won't get off the ground with rejection from all the major FOSS MTA's.

I believe MS knows it, but they appear to fail to understand that licensing means at least as much for FOSS developers as it does for them. They said that they would update their FAQ with a promise that they will never charge for Sender ID, but miss the point that that isn't enough for developers.

I think this is extremely interesting, because it is the first time MS and the FOSS community comes together over something like this, where everyone knows that we have to get a standard up working. We're seeing a clash of worldviews, but if MS steps down now, they will have learned a valuable lesson.

Re:not possible for section 7 of the gpl

[Alsee]

Not supporting something that _might_ cut down on spam for reasons they give is stupid.

Your anger is misdirected.

Microsoft intentionally sabotaged the proposed standard to prohibit full deployment by inserting exclusionary patent terms. Microsoft is attempting to hijack this standard (and hijack an international standards body) to attack the GPL and similar software.

Don't beleive me? Read Micrsoft's own FAQ, [microsoft.com] question 15.

Many mail servers are under the GPL licence or similar licences. Those mail servers would be prohibited from adopting the standard. Any mail server which could and did adopt the standard (and thus Microsoft's poison pill) would then begin rejecting any mail from GPL (or similar) mail servers. The excluded mail servers, being unable to serve mail, would be exterminated.

Embrace, Extend, Exterminate. You should be angry at Microsoft for attempting to sabotage the standard, for attempting to block full deployment of the standard, for attempting to insert a poison pill into the standard.

-

Re:not possible for section 7 of the gpl

[swillden]

No - FAQs say specifically that all GPL software can include royalty-free implementation of Sender-ID for mail-related purposes. They only need to include patent attribution to Microsoft.

And would someone who took a GPL'd implementation of SenderID and modified and redistributed it have to include attribution as well? What about people who just distributed it without modifications?

The GPL does not allow any additional restrictions to be added, so an attribution requirement is incompatible with the GPL.

Laughable (Re:A moment's pity for Microsoft, ple)

[CaptKilljoy]

>A moment's pity, therefore. They may be rich. That does not make them either smart, or right.

I can't help but to laugh at this example of uninformed zealotry. Even if I weren't dubious about MS meriting any pity, this is rather like a 8 year old child patting itself on the back for outrunning a geriatric in a wheelchair.

OSS fits somewhere into MS's problems, but is hardly the dominant factor. Aside from OSS, their primary problems right now stem from the the worldwide wave of anti-monopoly lawsuits, being crushed between the need to maintain compatibility with their insecure legacy interfaces and the need to leave them behind to catch up on security, their poor public image caused by bugs on one front and the failed Sofware Assurance licensing program on the other, and last but hardly least, lack of new markets/product offering categories to expand into.

Come back and proclaim victory when MS is bankrupt and combined revenues for Linux and OSS support/products (i.e. IBM's non-Linux/OSS divisions don't count) approach that of the proprietary software world. The former may be inevitable, but, unless the OSS world changes radically, I'd give long odds against the latter occurring anytime soon.