Apache Balks At Microsoft's Licensing In Anti-Spam Standard Sender ID

By TechWeb.com

The Apache Software Foundation, developers of the popular open-source Apache web server, said on Thursday that it wouldn't support the proposed anti-spam standard Sender ID, because the licensing terms set by Microsoft Corp. are too strict.

In a letter to the technical committee working on the specification, the foundation said Microsoft's terms for the use of its patented technology within the standard were incompatible with the terms of open-source licensing used by Apache.

The foundation said the "nontransferable" language in Microsoft's license, as well as its prohibitions on sub-licensing of the technology, made the software maker's terms unacceptable to the open-source development process.

"We believe the current license is generally incompatible with open source, contrary to the practice of open Internet standards, and specifically incompatible with the Apache License 2.0," the foundation wrote to the committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force. "Therefore, we will not implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms."

A Microsoft representative was not immediately available for comment.

Sender ID combines two standards that create a system for positively identifying whether an e-mail's source address is actually the originator of the message. Microsoft contributed its Caller ID specification, while the other, Sender Policy Framework, came from Meng Wong, founder of e-mail service provider Pobox.com.

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