Rex Ballard <[email protected]> writes: > On Mar 14, 4:06 pm, Doug Mentohl <[email protected]> wrote: >> 'Microsoft's got a long history of licensing its File Allocation >> Table/Long File Name (FAT LFN) with companies in the car navigation >> space and that have specifically been using Linux and open source' > > Linux had LFN for FAT back in 1993. Microsoft didn't introduce it > until Windows 95.
Wrong. NT had it first. > > Even before that was Sun PCNFS, which had it back in 1988-ish. > > Pat Volkerding had a fully functional LFN for FAT back in Slackware > 1.0, allowing Linux users to use FAT file systems for Linux files. > > Microsoft seems not to have noticed that there are more than a few > similarities between how Linux did it in 1993 and how Microsoft > finally did it in 1995. Keep in mind that Microsoft's code was > carefully guarded as trade secret, while the Linux code was published > in source code format. The preponderance of the evidence says that it > was Microsoft that stole from Linux, not the other way around. The > patent should be nullified, and the code should be published as Open > Source. > >> 'Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of >> intellectual property and licensing Horacio Gutierrez said 18 companies >> had signed up, including Kenwood, Alpine, and Pioneer' > > Just because they agreed to be part of Microsoft's "patent umbrella" > which protects them from patent troll whiplash lawyers, doesn't > necessarily mean that Microsoft has the right to enforce the patents. > Quite the opposite, if the patent application was fraudulent, and > failed to mention the pre-existing GPL code, the patent itself could > be nullified, or awarded to the prior author. That's the ugly problem > with Software Patents. Just because you were "first to file" doesn't > mean that you have the right to poach other people's work. > > For most of 30 years, Microsoft has depended on trade secrets, > proprietary code, copyright laws and licenses that strictly forbade > reverse engineering of code. Uh huh. So Wine is a figment of our imagination eh Rexx "Kingmaker" Ballard? _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
