I woke up this morning to read some hard-hitting political commentary. It was unflinching, it was personal. It was highly effective.

It came from neither George W. Bush or John F. Kerry. It came from Bill Thompson, a commentator for the BBC. And the man in Thompson's sights was Bill Gates.

It's good reading.

Microsoft has worked with other companies to define a useful way of limiting spam, but has decided that its own interests are greater than those of the wider community.

What may well happen is that the standard will be ratified even with Microsoft's licensing conditions, but it will only be fully implemented in proprietary mail systems.

The free software and open source communities will then be outside the charmed circle when it comes to blocking spam, making life difficult for companies that use their software.

This, of course, may be exactly what Microsoft is hoping for, as it would damage the credibility of free or open source software and give it a marketing advantage.

In the calm waters of the engineering community this is called "ripping your opponent a new one."

At issue here is Sender ID, a set of techniques for authenticating e-mail senders that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) wants to bake into all systems to stop spam. Microsoft has contributed its Caller ID technology to the mix, but now wants to make everyone who uses the whole take out a license that Linux users can't accept.

Caller ID has been added to Meng Wong's Sender Policy Framework (SPF), following extensive negotiations in which Microsoft threatened to keep the proposal from being adopted if its technology wasn't added.

Now Microsoft wants to force its license on the entire community, using the merged anti-spam standard as a wedge.

Thompson didn't use the proper word for this, because he's a proper English gentleman, so I will.

The word for this is extortion.