Apache Software Foundation among developers shunning Microsoft anti-spam measure. Opposition to Microsoft's Sender ID anti-spam email scheme is growing in the open source community, which is complaining about the software giant's licensing terms. . . .
Opposition to Microsoft's Sender ID anti-spam email scheme is growing in the open source community, which is complaining about the software giant's licensing terms.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) backed away from supporting Sender ID last Thursday, and fellow open source developer Debian followed suit at the weekend.

Sender ID aims to verify that an email has been originated within the internet domain from which it claims to come. The idea is to stop spam with forged sender email addresses getting through.

The ASF said in a statement: "The current Microsoft royalty-free Sender ID patent licence agreement terms are a barrier to any ASF project which wants to implement Sender ID.

"We believe that the current licence is generally incompatible with open source, contrary to the practice of open internet, and specifically incompatible with the Apache Licence 2.0.

"Therefore, we will not implement or deploy Sender ID under the current licence terms."

Debian also maintains that Microsoft's licence terms are incompatible with its own free software guidelines, and will not implement or deploy Sender ID.

The link for this article located at Peter Williams, vnunet.com is no longer available.