Miredo is an implementation of the Teredo - IPv6 over IPv4 tunnelling protocol which I have been playing with lately. I have filed an ITP bug to get Miredo into Debian, however this has been delayed while I try and get a handle on some of the patent issues surrounding the Teredo protocol. While Miredo itself is licensed under the GPLv2 the state of the Toredo protocol is less clear.

Teredo was created by Christian Huitema, an architect with Microsoft. It is currently a Proposed Internet Standard waiting for the IETF editor to review it and assign an RFC number for it, IANA will then assign a permanent prefix for use by Teredo clients, servers and relays.

According to the IETF IPR disclosure page, Microsoft has filed a statement of claim against the technologies described in the Proposed Standard. Microsoft states that they will provide a Royalty-Free, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory License to All Implementers in their statement. Specifically the license that they offer the Teredo protocol under is called the Microsoft Royalty Free Protocol License Agreement. This is a catch-all license that Microsoft uses for all client-server protocols used by Windows. The license itself doesn’t make any claims about Microsoft’s IP rights, it simply gives you a license to use any rights Microsoft may have in the specific protocol you are using. For example at the end of the license agreement you select which protocols you wish to have covered under the agreement. Alongside Teredo you can also choose protocols such as IPv4, DNS, 6to4 and lots of other common protocols.

The actual patent application for Teredo is incredibly difficult to find, the IETF IPR disclosoure doesn’t link to it, none of the proposed standards link to it and googling for “Teredo Patent Application” isn’t particularly successful either. In the end it turns out that the title is quirkily named “Allowing IPv4 clients to communicate over an IPv6 network when behind a network address translator with reduced server workload” and was published as Patent Application 20040190549 on the 30th September 2004.

• USPTO Patent Application 20040190549
• PDF Download of full original application (with diagrams) from the EU patent office - Click the ‘orginal document’ tab, cancel the download window that pops up (unless you only want the 1st page), then select ’save full document’ from the title bar above the tabs and go through the captcha form.

Incidentally if anyone knows of a nicer way to link to a US Patent Application than the ugly URL above, I would love to know.

Half the reason that the Patent Application was hard to find is that it doesn’t actually mention Microsoft anywhere at all, unlike the ~5000 odd other Patent Applications currently filed by Microsoft. From what I can tell it appears that Christian Huitema has filed the application through is own personal attorneys independently of Microsoft.

So where does this leave us in terms of getting Miredo into Debian? The short answer is I’m not entirely sure.

I can’t seem to find a definitive statement regarding Debian’s position on patents anywhere, the best I’ve been able to come up with is a debian-legal post from Andrew Suffield from Jan 2005 which offhandedly describes the informal Debian patent policy as:

“ignore patents until somebody starts to wave them around, then drop the offending thing like a hot rock”

So maybe I’ve already shot Miredo in the foot, by investigating its Patent Status…

My take on the situation seems to be that Debian is perfectly happy (and perhaps has no other option but) to ignore patents applicable to software in Debian until it becomes apparent that a particular patent is being enforced or has the potential to be enforced.

So the question now becomes whether the Microsoft Royalty Free Patent License is acceptable enough to Debian to allow Miredo to be included in main or non-free, or whether it simply can’t be redistributed at all. The main problem I see with the license is that it does not permit you to sublicense other parties to make use of the Toredo technology used by Miredo. If this were a copyright license then that would most certainly fail to pass the Debian Free Software Guidelines, does Debian treat patents in the same manner?

I think it’s time for me to post to debian-legal to seek some “official” guidance on the situation, but hopefully this post has ordered my thoughts enough that I can now write a coherent mail seeking help. If you have any comments or pointers to Debian statements on this sort of situation that I have missed they would be most welcome.

If you’re a bit bored I would highly recommend heading over to Firefox Flicks.

I haven’t had time to look through all of them yet, but of the 5 minutes I spent I found these, which range from:

The Good

• http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/ref.php?id=ba028495-b6a0-4f3e-9897-2fdf7b73aa46
• http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/ref.php?id=d0cfab54-9f8b-40ad-8f7a-6b7a0a33e7b7

through to the

The Average

• http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/ref.php?id=8f64413c-cc70-4c13-b314-17ce902174e9

and finally

The UGLY

• http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/ref.php?id=f8a93eae-bc80-4acb-8641-2cda3d1a9565
• http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/ref.php?id=d549cb49-e776-4e25-bf92-bfa52572fd1a

CRCnet Configuration System
Now that the CRCnet Configuration System is nearing a releasable state, we’ve had approval from the University’s commercialisation arm that we are allowed to release it under the GPL. This is good, I’ve been working on the system for the last year at least and it is nice to know that it will be available to the community at large. I think what is going to be most interesting to me is to see whether there is any interest in using it from external people and particularly how easy they find it to use.

The current plan is to release version 1.0 at LCA’06 in conjuction with our talk of everything that the CRCnet Project has achieved over the last few years.

Debian Stuff
Haven’t made a lot of progress with my NM application over the last month. I think both Alexander (my AM) and myself have been too busy with other things. Alexander did get the latest PHPwiki packages that I had prepared uploaded and there have been no new bug reports yet, so I think we’re making progress. This package made use of the wwwconfig-common functions developed by Sean Finney which was a great help and we’re much closer to having a robust PHPwiki package (and one that is up to date) than we were a few months ago.

The next step for the PHPwiki packages will be to try and migrate to the dbconfig-common structure for database creation and management. The hold-up there is that dbconfig-common does not support sqlite or sqlite3 at the moment. We use sqlite as the default database for the Debian PHPwiki package to save having to install a heavy-weight system such as mysql or postgresql. Reading the dbconfig-common documentation it seems that it will not be too difficult to add sqlite support so hopefully I will find some time for that over the Christmas break.

I wrote some scripts to nicely automate VAP creation with the new madwifi-ng drivers for Atheros wireless cards and posted them to the Atheros mailing list. Kel Modderman picked them up and pointed me towards the pkg-madwifi alioth project where madwifi packaging for Debian is being co-ordinated. It will be good to get involved with that as working with madwifi is a fairly large part of my job at the moment, so it will be easy for me to justify spending time on Debian packaging tasks for it.

The key issue we need to sort out here is whether udev rules or ifupdown hooks are the most appropriate way to create the VAP devices, or whether a combination of the two is required.

I’m pleased to have prompted a bit of a discussion on the linux-aus mailing list about Linux AU and the relationship with NZ. James Purser kicked things off with a blog post on Friday and so far the discussion is going really well. I’ve outlined a few more of my thoughts below.

I think the issue of national identity is probably the key to this whole discussion. It is important for the NZ community and LUGs to retain their own identity and not be subsumed into Australian identity.

When Craig, John and I started the Linux NZ discussion, it came in part from a fair degree of envy from what we were seeing Linux AU acheiving. If you read our initial invitation it was quite clear that we were looking for support to “duplicate” Linux AU into NZ. We didn’t get there, and after taking a month or two to think about it, I believe that trying to duplicate Linux AU into NZ was the wrong approach to take.

As beneficial as it would be in terms of creating a distinct identity there are far too many other things that it just doesn’t make any sense to duplicate at all. LCA, the podcasts and Advocacy preparation are the three key things that pop immediately to my mind and I’m sure there are others too.

I think the biggest thing we learnt from our LinuxNZ endeavours is that we don’t (currently?) have huge numbers of people available to do things in NZ, and we are always going to suffer from problems of scale to some extent. In many ways the more duplication we can avoid the better. That allows us to free what people we do have to focus on the things that are NZ specific.

This is the key reason that I’m pushing to see if there is support for Linux Australasia. It’s not that we want LinuxAU to adopt or subsume NZ LUGs, the idea is that LinuxAU would grow to include NZ and become a bigger, better and more inclusive organisation as a result. I guess the flipside for Australians is that the resulting organisation would be less nationalistic…. More on that in a minute. ISON probably fits in here too, I only just become aware them yesterday so I’m still reading their site. However my impression is that while it is definitely an organisation we should be linked with, its aims and goals are orthogonal to what I’m trying to achieve by proposing Linux Australasia.

The impression I’m getting from talking to Pia, and lurking on this list is that LA is working very hard to empower the members to be the workers rather than the committee. With the committee providing the organisational oversight, legal structure, vision and authority needed to keep everything hanging together. I think it’s a great strategy, and would fit in perfectly with the bigger, broader Linux Australasia that I’m proposing.

Give NZ members the opportunity to work on the press, publicity and advocacy sub-committees too and you’re pretty much there in terms of
achieving Linux Australasia! The sub-committees as a whole can work on their specific areas (avoiding unnecessary duplication) and then the
NZ/AU components of each sub-committee can do the necessary (hopefully minor) localisation work if and when required.

Following from this, if there is a need for a more nationalistic component then it’s simply a matter of creating a sub-committee to do the work required to “promote national identity”… perhaps we need to have FOSS competitions across the ditch so we can beat each other in something other than sport…

Plenty to think about and as many have pointed out the key place to resolve all this is probably going to be at LCA’06 in Dunedin. I think as James has pointed out though, it is going to be very beneficial for us all if we can do much of the talking beforehand and at least get an idea of where everyone is at, even if we are poles apart in terms of what we think.