At 7:30 pm -0400 2000-07-02, Openpgp wrote:
>On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Lucky Green wrote:
>>William,
>>[Several overlapping, and in some cases inappropriate, CC's elided].
>
>In your oppinion.
>
>>I suspect the original message you are referring to is a spoof.
>>Even if the message is not a spoof, the licensing terms of OpenSSL
>>and SSLeay are included with every one of the countless copies of
>>both libraries that have been distributed on the Internet over the
>>years. Anybody, which most definitely includes you, can verify
>>within minutes that OpenSSL and SSLeay ship with a with a
>>world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free license.
>
>The point of the message was to show the behaviour of RSADSI's
>employee's when talking to potential customers not wether or not
>they had a legal leg to stand on. From my previous interactions with
>RSADSI and their past legal actions with PGP Inc. I do not think
>that the original post was a spoof.
I'd have to agree. For anyone who's unaware, RSADSI resorted to
"interesting" legal practices in order to strategically destabilize
PGP Inc at a difficult time in it's history (immediately pre-NAI,
ostensibly to prevent further rounds of venture capital from keeping
PGP in business). They claimed (through special-purpose legal
respresentatives, who did not consult Cylink, which was still legally
RSA's PKP partner) before taking unilateral legal action, that we
(PGP) had "not paid royalties" when we had the cancelled checks to
show we had, begrudgingly, done so as required. They also tried to
circumvent the license agreement's very clear mandate on arbitration
in order to drag things out while PGP continued to search for
additional investors. This rather transparent strategy was widely
interpreted (and IMHO correctly) as plain and simple revenge for the
slick reverse triangular merger we engineered with ViaCrypt in order
to gain unfettered use of the algorithm for PGP 5.x+. We pissed off
RSADSI (read: Bidzos) and they played as dirty as they could to
strike back. NAI now owning PGP is proof that such tactics can
succeed.
If RSADSI is now trying to bully someone into paying unnecessary
license fees, a scant few months before their monopoly expires, it
would not surprise me. Of course, it's fairly unlikely that RSADSI's
staff know HOW to use digital signatures, much less that they
actually USE them in standard correspondence, so availing ourselves
of the very technology they claim to still control in order to
demonstrate that this particular employee cannot repudiate his
statements is ...unlikely. Now, if this person is willing to
digitally sign a new message to the effect that RSADSI is claiming
control over an Open IETF working group's output, I'd enjoy seeing
that... but then so much for their public claims to the contrary not
too long ago, eh? I guess back then they were just trying to "look"
as open as PGP really was in the IETF. Another huge surprise ...not!
;)
>>Now what I would like to know is this: why are you wasting the time
>>of thousands of individuals by spamming numerous mailing lists with
>>FUD that could have been trivially disproved by spending less than
>>5 minutes on research?
>
>IMHO the FUD is comming from RSADSI.
IMHO, you're both mostly on-target, and agreeing vehemently.
Mainly, after reading this thread, I think that 20 September 2000
(the expiry of RSA's patent) can't possibly come soon enough. I'm
sure many of you will agree. Frankly, in a world with some justice,
"PKP" (RSA et alia) should never have nad a patent granted on a
freedom-enhancing mathematical algorithm developed at public expense
at a public university and prereleased into the public domain (in
SciAm) anyway, but beating that dead horse won't make it get up and
run.
In any event, we'll have big parties in September and any RSADSI
employees who want to attend are invited to come and watch us toast
their company's complete irrelevance with glee.
It's almost funny it's so sad: I've been telling RSA for about two
years that they'd be wise to adopt a new kind of public/business
stance, rather than continually pissing all of us off, leaving
themselves come October with nothing but a hollow legacy and a lot of
people who simply won't do business with them on basic principle, but
apparently none of them listen very well.
More the fools them.
dave
_____________________________________________________________
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."
--John Del Torto
