Is Sender ID Dead in the Water? - No MARID Working Group Consensus (Groklaw)

Posted Sep 9, 2004 20:29 UTC (Thu) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

Many administrators, especially those running live and busy systems, are very reluctant to diverge much from the standard packaging of free software that comes with thier chosen distribution. If you have particular specialist knowledge e.g. of Sendmail you might be willing to build the official distribution from source. However, few will experiment with an unofficial patch from a third party on a live and busy working system. While it is certainly true that free software has the advantage that you can experiment with it, few want to risk service reliability to end users by doing so, and not everyone has the luxury of parrallel working and test systems to experiment on.

Posted Sep 9, 2004 20:50 UTC (Thu) by nigelm (subscriber, #622) [Link]

> even if postfix, exim, qmail, etc. won't support Sender ID,
> there might be some "unofficial" patches to "fix" them.

The legal position of these might be very iffy - the person producing the patches would need to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft, as would all the recipients in this case. You would not be able to make the patches GPL due to the additional restrictions provisions, so the patched version would not be distributable (at least in the case of exim and courier). Personally I would not sign this sort of faustian deal with MS since you would be skating on the very edge of the licensing to start with - and they have more lawyers and more money than me.