netman4ttm
08-27-2004, 08:43 AM
Well we are back to SPF. I cannot believe that Microsoft insists upon being an anal wart over the issue of spam. Do they seriously think people will go to Exchange or Microsoft DNS. Not a chance.
"Perhaps Microsoft thought that Sender ID was such a killer standard that they could push people around, but it's not. They've only boxed themselves out of the process. The rest of the SID standards process will now be a waste of time thanks to Microsoft, and the other participants will afterwards pick up the pieces and get the job done with another spec. Rest assured that enough alternatives were proposed that something can be found that will suffice and that will have none of the license issues."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1639880,00.asp
mushroom
08-27-2004, 05:43 PM
No real supprise just Microsoft showing their true colors.
Just in it for the money & power.
mikmik
08-28-2004, 10:37 AM
Yeah, but I am starting to wonder about Seltzer. He has done an about face, and I don't see a difference in the licence.
July26:
He's right, at least as I read the license. It says that you can implement the spec for free, but you need to make an agreement with them, i.e. directly with Microsoft. You can't just put the code up on a Web site and let anyone else download it and use it. He goes on to say, "In the absence of resistance, Microsoft has a good chance of imposing whatever standards it likes. Let us, therefore, resist it here and now."
I decline to be inspired by this call to action. The free software movement has been notably useless in the fight against spam. The members of the 9/11 commission are going around advocating their report's recommendations saying, "If you don't like them, come up with something better, because something has to be done now." That's how I feel about SMTP authentication. Nothing useful can be done about spam until some form of SMTP authentication is in place, and I would also argue that RFC2822 authentication—what the Caller ID part of the spec does—is a necessary part of it. If you don't like the spec, come up with something better
Now, it is hypocritical, actually, claiming "I tried to warn them"??????? What? Not on July 26 you didn't, you condemmed the open source community and made light of the Licence issue. Now, the same reasons mean the opposite?
But Sender ID is different. It is intended for a software market that has had a large presence of open source software. There is some dispute in the working group over whether the license is or is not compatible with most open-source licenses, especially the GPL, but there is a consensus that it is at least problematic for those licenses and a poke in the eye of those who use them. And lawyers from the Free Software Foundation have stated that the license is not GPL-compatible.
I tried to warn them, and I know I wasn't alone. Microsoft gave the impression that stopping spam, phishing and other abuses of e-mail was important to them, but it obviously wasn't important enough. For Sender ID to be successful it needs to be adopted widely, and the only way that was going to happen was if it was unencumbered by burdensome licenses. And it had to be obviously free in everyone's sense of the word so that everyone could feel free implementing it and getting to the important business of fixing the broken e-mail system on the Internet. Microsoft just couldn't bring themselves to do it. Instead they actually advise people, if they are unsure of how the license affects them, to hire a lawyer.
So, what changed, besides his opinion?
Licensing issues are most definitely not unique to microsoft.
Try blaming the spammers and virus writers for this mess. They are after money and power, aren't they?
ronniethedodger
08-28-2004, 06:46 PM
No real supprise just Microsoft showing their true colors.
Just in it for the money & power.
Seems that people are forgetting about the other alternative here -- Yahoo's DomainKeys. I guess they must not be in it for money or power though.
Silly me ... it is okay to have their name branded on all products that use their patented technology. They are offering this technology for "free" too, yeah right. What does F-O-R-G-E-N-T spell?
And holy cow. Regardless of what the IETF says, Yahoo and AOL are rolling out sender authentication (http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/11/HNaolyahoo_1.html) anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I am not for either MicroSoft or Yahoo meddling into this. But if it wasn't for MicroSoft, then the second most popular word in all your email ("the" being the first) would have been "Yahoo".
It does look like we will have two specs running here shortly though. AOL will be using a form of MicroSoft's SenderID and Yahoo has DomainKeys. These will be up and running before year end. Another spec war is on its way.
But as Seltzer also said, "If you don't like the spec, come up with something better"