Licensing Question/Concern about dkim-milter

[Michael D. Stemle, Jr.]

On Wednesday 18 July 2007 14:41:01 Scott Kitterman wrote:
> 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-mi
>lter_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.

This is a good question... but I think the answer here is that the use of 
sendmail as an external program is not necessarily a violation of the GPL.  
Sendmail is not linking to GPL'ed code, and it is not a dependency of GPL'ed 
code.  They are separate programs, IIRC.  You can use one to talk to another 
in the same way you could pipe the output of a proprietary program into Emacs 
without violating any licenses.  I think we'd have an incompatibility if one 
was requiring or linking to the other, but since it's a usage pattern and not 
a software link it's not an issue.

My opinion, however, is no substitute for sound legal counsel.  Wouldn't it be 
much easier if Yahoo hadn't been jerky enough to patent this in the first 
place?

-- 
~ Michael D. Stemle, Jr. <><
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nfluence with large hammer
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