Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 02:06:24 -0500 From: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) To: patent-news@world.std.com Subject: PATNEWS: IBM's free software offer - how about its patents? !19981214 IBM's free software offer - how about its patents? Today's New York Times reports that IBM is joining the free software movement by releasing the source code to its secure electronic mail processing program, Secure Mailer. "Secure Mailer offers an alternative to several other freely available programs that route Internet mail, including Sendmail and QMail, as well as to commercial programs like Microsoft's Exchange". ... "IBM researchers said that one of the drawbacks to Sendmail was that it had been written as a large, monolithic piece of software. As a result it has both performance and security limitations". ... "In contrast, Mr. Venema [an IBM researcher] has developed Secure Mailer as a cluster of modules, all of which distrust each other. This creates a more secure program." Sounds like great software, and a welcome addition to the free software movement. But unlike most other contributors to the free software movement, IBM has a large issued and pending patent portfolio, and a reputation of asserting its patent portfolio aggressively. Will IBM be issuing guarantees that anyone using the Secure Mailer system will be exempt from infringement of IBM patents that pertain to Secure Mailer? A needless worry you say? Well the November 9th issue of NetworkWorld reports that IBM informed the IETF that IBM will charge licensing fees for pending patents that pertain to the Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) quality-of-service (QoS) specification. MPLS defines a standard way to steer IP traffic through the Internet over predefined routes, providing predictable performance, and thereby helping to guarantee IP QoS. IBM's attitude: "The Internet Engineering Task Force will have to get used to patented technology", says John Tavs, TCP/IP technology manager for IBM in Research Triangle Park. "As long as patents are legal in the US and networks are important to business, then patents will play an important role in the standards process. The Internet community has to decide how it's going to responsibly address patented technology", Tavs says. Nice pompous posturing from IBM, given IBM's refusal to take the patent process responsibly by doing much searching for its patent applications (on top of fighting any reform to the PTO's computing examination system), forcing groups like the IETF to then have to deal with IBM's portfolio. IBM says it also has patent pending on other technologies such as the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol and the Open Shortest Path First Protocol. But, as observed by IETF chairman Fred Baker: "Intellectual property in its own right is not a problem", Baker says. But by complicating a standard, the company may force implementers to seek alternative methods for carrying out the specification, he says. "If there are two equal technologies, they will go for the unencumbered one". Tom Downey, Cisco's director of product marketing for the Enterprise WAN business unit says IBM's patent claims are part of IBM's "Old World" attitude: "In the New World of networking, patents are there to horse trade and cross-license, not to make money". He adds that the smaller vendors - the start-ups - are going to be the ones affected because the larger vendors can just swap patents with IBM. Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic marketing and technologies at Nortel Networks: "If you are a small company, you are not going to pay a lot for a patent - because you can't." Mel Beckman, chief technology officer for the Systems and Software Consortium, an ISP in Santa Barbara, says he already has to pay an extra 7% more for his Cisco routers with SNA capabilities because Cisco licenses SNA from IBM, adding that IBM is going against the nature of open standards: "Vendors bring their technology to the table to promulgate standards for interoperability, not to feather their nests. I'd be worried about standards that could get set and then vendors get the money for it. Proprietary interests stifle innovation. It's not healthy for the open standards process". So what's does all of this mean in light of IBM's offer to release the source code to Secure Mailer? Just that those in the free software community starting to interact with IBM (such as the current talks over Apache, and efforts to support Linux) should be very careful. You could eng up shaking one hand of IBM and getting slapped by another. And all of this is yet another example of the waste and confusion caused by the PTO's apathy to issuing quality computing and networking patents, waste and confusion that hurts small entities way too much. If you don't like IBM's patenting activities, just don't complain to/about IBM, complain to and about the PTO is too addicted to issuing "licenses to sue". ==================== A news item over the Bloomberg wire reports that Britain's Elonex PLC sued Dell, Packard Bell and Micron Electronics over patents dealing with reduced power consuming color monitors. ==================== Wall Street Journal recently reported that three lawsuits were dismissed that had been filed against Intuit over Year 2000 problems with its Quicken personal finance software, apparently over problems Quicken might have with its online banking module not handling dates starting in 2000. About 20 Year-2000 patents have been issued by the PTO to date, all improperly examined by seven different primary examiners who missed some fairly blatantly obvious prior art. But that's a PATNEWS bash for after the holidays. ==================== Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service