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Re: Modular approach to key management
Ashar Aziz says:
> Sun will license on a royalty-free basis the SKIP patents to all
> comers. There will be a ONE-TIME fee of $99, which is required
> for legal reasons, not financial. This is because the only
> purpose of the license is defensive (Sun disclaims all liability)
> and the reason for the fee is that contract law stipulates that
> something of value has to exchange for a contract to bind.
Nominal fees of this sort are usually set at $1, not $99. I have never
in all my years heard of a token consideration being set at
$99. However, I refuse to pay even $1. If Sun truly wants to give up
making money on the patent it can do what Bell Labs did with the
patent on the SUID bit -- assign it to the public domain so that
anyone can use it. If Sun truly wishes not to make money on this
patent this is the traditional course of action. Anything else makes
me suspicious.
In any case, I, for one, will not support ANY barriers to the use of
IETF standard protocols. That means that it makes no difference what
the fee is -- the problem is that paperwork has to be filed, which
means that public implementations cannot be freely distributed and
then commercially used. As I said, if sun truly has no financial
interest in this, it can just give up rights to the patent, period.
Perry
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