[ Thanks to rusty
for this link. ]
“Bruce Perens’s Technocrat article criticizing the Kerberos
protocol of having been released under excessively liberal terms is
on the mark. While it may not be clear, Bruce isn’t calling for
release of the protocol under the terms of the GNU GPL, but that
similar licensing concepts be applied. The Kerberos protocol must
be freely available, assure interoperability, and require that new
implementations of the standard be similarly made freely available.
Copyright-based licensing, while common in the free software
community, is the wrong tool for this job.”
“Kerberos is licensed under terms which are too generous and too
open to abuse, particularly in a climate in which
embrace-and-extend “innovation” — hostile hijacking of open
standards — is common “competitive” practice. The protocol is
currently in danger of being splintered and rendered meaningless by
the self-serving actions of Microsoft. Closer attention to how
standards are established in the free software community is called
for.”
“The problem in the free software community is that we’ve
adopted an “our tool is a hammer and the world is a nail” approach
to intellectual property. The focus is on copyright licensing
terms, inspired by the success of the GNU GPL, BSD, and MIT
licenses. Patents are almost universally decried as an evil
abomination on the face of software, and trademark is virtually
ignored, except to the extent companies don’t wish to lose control
of existing brands. We keep trying to pound our IP nails with
our copyright license hammers, and get frustrated when the nails
get bent, or refuse to drive home.”