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Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 09:59:28 -0500
To: dims@apache.org
From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
Subject: Re: IBM and WS-Security
Cc: Jeffrey Thompson <jthom@us.ibm.com>, legal-discuss@apache.org
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At 09:22 AM 6/24/2005, Davanum Srinivas wrote:
>William,
>
>In this specific case, Microsoft has not divulged which patent(s) if
>any are infringed upon. In the case of IBM and Verisign, from their
>legal counsel we know that there are no patents involved on their
>side. For microsoft's initial response to my question on specific
>patents, see (http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/wss/200506/msg00123.html).
>I think i finally managed to get through to a key decision maker there
>- Andrew Layman. Hopefully, we will hear something one way or another.

Good luck!

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wss/ipr.php

FWIW, I don't see how this statement from IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign
would not cover us;

2. Each Author commits to grant a non sub-licensable, non-transferable
license to third parties, under royalty-free and other reasonable and 
non-discriminatory terms and conditions, to certain of their respective 
patent claims that such Author deems necessary to implement required 
portions of the WS-Security specification, provided a reciprocal license 
is granted. 

You would need to note every separately licensed patent within
the NOTICE file of your project, of course.  However, does this
mean they are not offering royalty-free licensing to users, only
to developers (implement)?  Note it's explicitly a non-transferable
license.

Content Guard proposed RAND license if they were infringed, which
isn't acceptable (royalty free is not stated).  RSA requires 
a separate licensing contract through their web site, which 
certainly seems to be an excessive term of their grant offer
(http://www.rsasecurity.com/node.asp?id=2531).

Bill


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