Re: [ietf-dkim] IPR disclosures, was Collecting re-chartering questions

[Steve Atkins <[e-mail]>]

On Jan 25, 2010, at 8:51 AM, John Levine wrote:

>>> 1. Advance DKIM base to Draft Standard
>> 
>> I'd require Yahoo! Inc's IPR to be upgraded to the current GPL release 
>> before that. (See https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/693/)
> 
> The reference to the GPL looks to me like it only covers the old
> Sourceforge DK library, which I don't think anyone uses any more.  The
> patent, which is what's important, is covered by a separate license
> that Yahoo wrote.
> 
> Even if Yahoo were willing, this would involve negotiations with their
> lawyers which always takes a long time.  What would be the advantage
> to anyone of demanding license changes for obsolete code?

It's more of an issue than that.

The licensing declaration allows anyone to use the IP contained in
Yahoos patents under one of two licenses. One is the "DomainKeys
Patent License[1]" - which only applies to implementations of DomainKeys,
and doesn't apply to any DKIM implementation, if I'm reading it correctly.
Specifically, if you're not implementing draft-delany-domainkeys-base-01.txt, it
doesn't apply.

The other is the "GNU General Public License 2.0" which can't really
be applied to an IP release in a useful manner, as it's really a source
code license (I'm allowed to use the IP, as long as I make the source code
for any changes to the IP available to any user of the IP... Uhm, what?).

OTOH, the licensing for DomainKeys has been a trainwreck since that
was put together, and Yahoo haven't sued anyone yet, nor has anyone
been seriously discouraged from implementing it, AFAIK.

Cheers,
  Steve

[1] http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/license/patentlicense1-2.html
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