Danny O'Brien's continuing his brilliant series, "To Evil," a monthly column in which he picks out a few genuinely evil people in the tech industry and describes their sins for our edification and amusement (and Danny is very, very amusing: "Ziff-Davidians" indeed!).
We start, as any trawl through the inferno should, up to our thighs in spam.
This month, Redmond's lawyers sprayed a unique license from its hind-most intellectual property glands – all over the IETF's proposal for an anti-spam mail authentication standard, Sender ID.
As ever, open source kill-joys had a few problems with Microsoft's license. First, the patent license they offered wasn't transferable. So everyone who got the source had to sign a deal with Microsoft to use their super-special patented technology.
(Thanks, Steve!)
