The Debian project said in a statement that Microsoft's licence terms are incompatible with its free software guidelines. It will not implement or deploy Sender ID and will not support the standard in other software that implements it.
Sender ID has been developed to combat domain spoofing -- faking the sender's address -- in spam e-mails, by verifying that each e-mail originates from the Internet domain that it claims to come from.
It is hoped that Sender ID will help companies identify and filter junk mail. Domain spoofing has also caused problems for legitimate senders who have found their domain blacklisted by anti-spam organisations due to their address being faked on spam e-mails.
Microsoft has released Sender ID under a royalty free licence, meaning that organisations who wish to use the standard have to sign a licence agreement. In an FAQ on the Microsoft Web site, the company said that an implementation of Sender ID can probably be distributed under an open-source licence on condition that the source code displays a statement saying that it may include intellectual property of Microsoft.
"While each open-source software licence may differ, we believe you can distribute your implementation under most open-source software licences, so long as you include the attribution stipulated in Section 2.2 of Microsoft's Royalty Free Sender ID Patent License," it said on the Microsoft Web site.
A Microsoft representative was not immediately available for comment on this issue.
ZDNet UK's Ingrid Marson reported from London. For more coverage from ZDNet UK, click here.
I am very happy that people at Apache and Debian reject this ridiculous proposal by M$. If M$ wants it to be an open standard, why all the licence and patents attachments? They just want to bill people in 10 years time.