Licensing Question/Concern about dkim-milter

[Scott Kitterman]

The dkim-milter has for some time been included in the Gutsy repositories.

There is a potential patent licensing issue with this package:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dkim-milter

For copyright, the package in licensed under the Sendmail Open Source license:

http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/universe/d/dkim-milter/dkim-milter_1.0.0.dfsg-1/dkim-filter.copyright

This is all good.

The trick is that Yahoo! claims a patent license is required for DKIM:

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys

They give two options for licensing:

1.  GPL v2 (only v 2)
2.  Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License Agreement

That license is here:

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys/patentlicense1-2.html

To my untrained eye, the Sendmail Open Source license is not GPL compatible, 
and so by inference we would have to be distributing under the Yahoo patent 
license (assuming Ubuntu/Canonical cares).  That license has requirements 
that the package does not meet and I'm not sure it is distributable except in 
multiverse (does a recipricol grant of patent license make it non-free?).

Do we care about such patent claims?

If we do, what do we do about it?

Scott K

P.S.  Debian has the same issue.