Standards Law David Rudin's Unoffical Standards Law Blog

Sender ID added to Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise

Microsoft today announced that the four specifications that make up Sender ID are being made available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP).  Jason and Brent have comments on the announcement and how making Sender ID patents available under the OSP fits into Microsoft's approach to interoperability.

Standards usually don't make the front page of the Washington Post, but Sender ID did.  For that reason alone, Sender ID is not your everyday standard.  The hope behind Sender ID was to provide a widely deployed system to authenticate email.  When Sender ID was brought to the IETF, Microsoft, in accordance with IETF polices, disclosed the existence of its pending patent claims.  Microsoft also agreed to license its patent claims on the Sender ID specification on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms without royalty.

It's important to point out that this disclosure went beyond IETF requirements, which require patents be disclosed but does not prohibit licensing on a royalty basis. Microsoft's intent was to foster the wide adoption of the Sender ID specification by offering its necessary patents to implementers at no charge or royalty.  Microsoft's royalty free terms, however, were met with opposition primarily from the open source community.  Despite this opposition, more than 5 million domain holders have adopted Sender ID. 

The reason I bring up this history is to show how Microsoft's approach to standards licensing is evolving.  When Microsoft offered to make its necessary patents available to Sender ID implementers on royalty free RAND terms, Microsoft was in fact making its patents available under one of its most permissive licensing approaches (and one that was never, to my knowledge, greeted with the kind of opposition it received at the IETF, home of many royalty based standards).  To be clear, Microsoft's goal was to license its technology in a manner that would encourage adoption.  Since that time, Microsoft has spent a great amount of effort refining its standards licensing approaches and working with the community to find new approaches to standards based licensing.  One result of that process has been Microsoft's adoption of the OSP - an approach that was not available to Microsoft when Sender ID was brought to the IETF. 

Although the application of the OSP to Sender ID has been warmly received (as has the OSP's application to certain WS specs and the Virtual Hard Disk Image Format Specification), a comment by Rich Jennings about Sender ID and the OSP caught my attention.

As far as I can tell, nothing has changed. There's no news here. Move along.

This promise seems to be exactly the same promise as was made by Microsoft in 2004. It's a promise that didn't prevent the MARID working group from failing to reach consensus -- mainly due to deadlock over the IP issue.

Although I've posted about the OSP before, I think it's important to emphasize that the OSP is in fact a different approach to standards licensing than royalty free RAND licensing.  A royalty free RAND license, despite being free, does require implementers to actually obtain that license.  The OSP does not require an implementer to come to Microsoft for that license.  This also removes issues related to sublicensing, which is of concern to the open source community, since the OSP extends directly to each user of the spec.  These are a few of the several reasons why the OSP has received the support of companies including Red Hat and SendMail.  It's Microsoft's hope that the OSP's application to Sender ID will in fact resolve lingering IP licensing issues related to Sender ID.