Re: legal status of David Brownell's zcip code

On Tuesday 21 December 2004 10:07 am, Michael Schmidt wrote:

> | What exactly were those patent claims?  I kind of thought
> | the issue with the earlier code wasn't really patents,
> | though it's a bit puzzling why the ZCIP I-D still hasn't
> | been finalized as an RFC.
> 
> I remember that - when searching for the earlier zcip code on the zcip
> web site - I found a comment that this code had been withdrawn by its
> maintainers due to pending patent claims on the zeroconf zcip mechanism
> by Apple.

The relevant statement seems to be

  http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/apple-ipr-draft-ietf-zeroconf-ipv4-linklocal.txt

And the capsule summary is that there are two patents granted for
AppleTalk in 1987.  Which with a 17 year patent lifetime means they
should both be expired ... though these might have been subject to
that three year implicit extension of a while back.

Whether Apple would sue to prevent people from adopting technology
they're pushing (with no biz deal with Apple?) is a different issue!

For good fun, I just pinged the address Apple gave in that note,
asking if they'd give a zero cost license for use by that code
which I sent.


> I really appreciate your code. The independency of two (partly outdated)
> libraries is a big benefit.

Thanks.  All I really did was clean up the code from AVH, switch
to GPL (from LGPL), and update it to match the current I-D.  The
previous stuff wasn't usable in a BusyBox style environment; but
something less than 3KB seems distinctly more interesting!

- Dave


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