Or should that be: "Beware of geeks bearing gifts?"

A while ago, Microsoft promised they'd eliminate spam completely. An inveterate Microsoft watcher, I was pretty sure I knew how that would turn out.

Today my fears were confirmed:

Many of the license provisions worry open-source developers. According to an analysis done by Larry Rosen, general counsel of the Open Source Initiative, Microsoft's License would require mail service providers incorporating Sender ID into their products to tell Microsoft about customers using it.

The software giant also has not informed the IETF of potential patents pending on the technologies, and the license is not compatible with open-source development groups and requires users to be subject to U.S. export control laws, the analysis stated.

(If you didn't follow that, I'll explain in a minute what all that means.)

If computing standards were cars, Microsoft's typical response to innovation would be this: Someone invents the car. Microsoft responds, "Great, we're on board." Then, Microsoft works around the original patent by coming up with their own, screwed-up version of the car (say, they have the steering wheel come up through the front hood, and duct tape the driver's seat to the outside of the windsheild.) They patent this, and announce it's the only standard they'll work with -- if you want to work with Microsoft, you have to start driving their own wacky version of the car.

In the end, this usually has the worst of all possible results: People end up doing both things, but doing Microsoft's thing more often. It's harder to work with and doesn't work nearly as well, and so the customer gets something which is really expensive, a pain to use, and barely works.

And this is what MS is doing with spam: Instead of signing on to a perfectly good open standard, they want to come up with their own private version of it -- essentially a system which puts all your personal information into Bill Gates's hands if you want to send e-mail, and forces eveyone to pay money to Microsoft.

The open-source people -- people who make very popular but free software -- refuse to play this game. So technology sits at loggerheads.

So Bill Gates, not spammers, ends up being the main obstacle to progress, because nobody gets anything unless he allows it, and he's not gonna let anyone do anything unless it all happens his way.

Thanks again, Bill.