On the flipside.. you’ve got freeware developers, you’ve got free, open-source mail server packages and/or filtering software. Much of this free filtering, email verification, etc. software doesn’t use corporate-sounding names, doesn’t charge for it and isn’t capable of being used in a way to defeat what it was designed for in the first place.

You either pay for expensive sounding crap. or you go with the free (and/or open-source) but more reliable alternatives.

Is it just me, or does it seem that free software resulting from collaborative (like p2p!!) community projects… turns out to be so much better than products where the focus is on marketing and maximum profit??

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Why not just use the Sender Policy Framework,
which is, as I understand it, free?

Would it really be so difficult to drop MS from the standard?

More importantly, what exactly is MS laying claims to exactly?
A public document wich discusses a public standard made
with the contributions of lots of people that have nothing to do with MS?
How can they own that?
The whole patenting of ideas as inventions is completely ridiculous.

Actually, MS has stated they will never charge a dime for the license…it’s really about incompatibility with the GPL, any software incorp’ing Sender-ID would be incompatible with the GPL therefore rendering the software pretty much useless to the FOSS philosophy, in essence ‘ghettoizing’ open source software using the GPL.

However, the only major player to ‘agree’ to incorp’ing Sender-ID is Sendmail, others like Apache, Debian, Qmail have said they will not and cannot use Sender-ID with the current licensing scheme.

Really, it’s an attack on the GPL…MS trying to backdoor FOSS after it’s first attempts using SCO and Toucqeville are failing/failed. I’ve said before on Groklaw, SCO won’t be the only attempt, but just the first one, the methods of attack will change but the goal will remain the same…anti-competitive behavior and marginalizing the GPL.

(Posted by Jon for TT)