Re: iSCSI: PAK: an alternative to SRP and DH-CHAP

[Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@wasabisystems.com>]

On Mon, 29 Apr 2002, Philip MacKenzie wrote:

> Bill, Ofer, David, and everyone,
>
> I am still working with others at Lucent on firming
> up the patent and licensing issues, and will try to give
> you a very complete and clear answer very soon,
> with as little ambiguity as possible.  I understand
> that this is _very important_ and it is my top priority
> right now.
>
> In the meantime, I can say that to my personal knowledge,
> I know that PAK depends on (at least) the EKE patent
> (owned by Lucent) and at least one patent application
> from Lucent.  There may be other patents that apply, but I
> personally do not know of them.
>
> Also, the following statement from Lucent applies:
>
> In the event that any Lucent patents and/or patent applications
> are determined to be essential to the implementation of
> PAK in iSCSI as an IETF standards track specification, Lucent
> is prepared to grant - on the basis of reciprocity (grantback) -
> a license to those patents and/or patent applications on reasonable
> and non-discriminatory terms.

The problem is that "reasonable and non-discriminatory" isn't good enough.
While it's fine for commercial vendors, it won't work for the open source
community. iSCSI with SRP won't be able to get into the NetBSD kernel for
instance. I doubt it will get into the FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux kernels
either.

I don't see how iSCSI with PAK will fare any different. Yes, PAK so far
seems better in that it's more of a one-stop licensor (so far), but it's
still heavy-enough IPR to cause problems. In fact, it's a bit worse in
that here the patent holder wants licensing fees, whereas Stanford, for
SRP, doesn't. :-|

Thoughts?

Take care,

Bill