Apache and Debian Tell Microsoft that Sender I.D. is Still Deficient   - 2,181 Views, 2 Comments

As Aunty reported back in October, Microsoft reintroduced its roundly rejected Sender I.D. proposal, after, it says, reworking it a bit to meet some of the objections which did it in the first time. And true, to their credit, they did address at least one of the technical concerns.

However the far bigger concern in some minds was Microsoft’s onerous licensing requirements and pending patent application on the Sender I.D. technology (which many feel also attempts to patent technology which has been around for a long time and was not invented by Microsoft), and their reputation for being willing to do almost anything to do in any open source competition.

After having reviewed the reworked Sender I.D. proposal, the Apache Software Foundation, whose rejection of the first proposal helped to tip the scales against Sender I.D., and the Debian GNU/Linux Project have both voted the proposal off the authentication island, giving it a big thumbs down.

A Debian spokesman indicated that the changes made “did not look promising”, and Apache indicated that the changes made did not actually alter the terms of the license.

The denouncement comes just a week before the Federal Trade Commission’s Summit on Email Authentication, at which Microsoft will presumably be pitching hard to push their Sender I.D. protocol as the industry standard. There is a lot at stake here, as Congress has intimated that if the industry doesn’t come up with an agreed-upon standard, they may mandate one.

Of course, given their ability to navigate the poltiical process, that may be a more assured way for Microsoft to become the established standard anyways.

You can read more about this here.