Re: Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License

[Justin Mason <jm...@jmason.org>]

Noel J. Bergman writes:
> robert burrell donkin wrote:
> 
> > i've found out that noel raised this in november
> 
> And I still don't have a resolved answer.  Cliff seems to feel that it is
> OK.  Roy and Greg, for different reasons I believe, appear to feel that it
> is not OK.
> 
> And I am told by Lisa Dusseault, who has read the public thread on
> legal-discuss, that we need to have a resolution for this *ASAP* because
> there is a very small window left where we can have it changed before this
> becomes a formal RFC.
> 
> I do feel that there is an urgency to getting a policy resolution on this
> matter ASAP.  I don't know if this is something that the Board is willing to
> have come from our VP of Legal Affairs, or if the Board itself wants to make
> a resolution, but we need to either have Yahoo! amend the terms, agree to
> accept the terms, or we have to ban the use of the RFC by ASF projects.

And how does that affect our use in SpamAssassin (where it is used via
external, third-party CPAN modules,
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Mail-DomainKeys/ and
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Mail-DKIM/ , rather than in SpamAssassin
code?)

Where are the discussions of this happening?  Can I bring pressure to bear
from the SpamAssassin angle?

--j.

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RE: Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License

["Noel J. Bergman" <no...@devtech.com>]

Justin Mason wrote:

> Noel J. Bergman writes:
> > I still don't have a resolved answer.  Cliff seems to feel that it is
> > OK.  Roy and Greg, for different reasons I believe, appear to feel
> > that it is not OK.
> >
> > And I am told by Lisa Dusseault, who has read the public thread on
> > legal-discuss, that we need to have a resolution for this *ASAP* because
> > there is a very small window left where we can have it changed before
this
> > becomes a formal RFC.
> >
> > I do feel that there is an urgency to getting a policy resolution on
this
> > matter ASAP.  I don't know if this is something that the Board is
willing to
> > have come from our VP of Legal Affairs, or if the Board itself wants to
make
> > a resolution, but we need to either have Yahoo! amend the terms, agree
to
> > accept the terms, or we have to ban the use of the RFC by ASF projects.
>
> And how does that affect our use in SpamAssassin (where it is used via
> external, third-party CPAN modules,
> http://search.cpan.org/dist/Mail-DomainKeys/ and
> http://search.cpan.org/dist/Mail-DKIM/ , rather than in SpamAssassin
> code?)

I don't know.  It would probably mean that we cannot distribute it, but
users could plug it in on their own.  But I believe that you just answered a
question of mine that you can find in the legal-internal archives if you
look back at November 18, 2006.

In the case of JAMES, we'd want to make DKIM code directly available to the
public under the ASF license.

> Where are the discussions of this happening?  Can I bring pressure to bear
> from the SpamAssassin angle?

Until Robert raised this issue here on legal-discuss, all of the ASF
discussion was on our closed, internal, list.  I had discussions with the
IETF/DKIM folks via direct e-mail, and had forwarded all of that directly to
Cliff.  I'll repost to legal-internal today.  I do have Lisa's approval to
post the following from her, here in public:

---------------
[To] really change anything at this stage in the WG/document process, it's
IETF consensus that matters.  The IETF has long decided that it needs the
option to adopt protected technology in standards if that's really the right
thing to do, and it's IETF consensus that decides if it's the right thing to
do.  In practice it's been a long time since the IETF ever standardized any
technology that was protected unless it was also freely available, and what
we seem to have here is a technology licensed under terms that people
generally believe make it freely available and usable.

If Apache has decided that this is not an acceptable set of license options,
and that this does or could block Apache from implementing, then I think a
public statement to that effect at ietf@ietf.org would not be ignored.  Such
a statement would have to come soon before DKIM is approved, and it still
might not have any effect, and would certainly upset some people, but it
would not be ignored.
---------------

	--- Noel



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