On Sunday, 12 בNovember 2006 12:10, Amos Shapira wrote:
> PLEASE DO YOUR RESEARCH - the NTFS isn't covered by any patent,
You determinism has nothing to build upon. Some reading will
help put your claims into proper perspective:
"Like a submarine, it stays under water, i.e., unpublished, for long,
then emerges, i.e., granted and published, and surprises the whole
market."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent
That's a theoretical argument - it might be relevant ONLY if MS starts claiming patents in Open Source code, and this could happen regardless of the agreement with Novell.
It's not MS specific at all. For a totally unrelated example you
may search for "Rambus", "DRAM", "patents". To save readers time:
[ summary of the Rumbus affair deleted for brevity ]
* It may make you happy to know that finally:
"FTC Reverses Itself, Blasts Rambus for Creating Unlawful Monopoly"
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060802142411821&mode=print
Hmmm... but this happend only on August-2006!
A few points:
1. This was a hardware product and, as you wrote, without implementing the patents the products that the companies were sued over wouldn't be worth a dime. In the MS so-alleged NTFS patents it's a possible addition to a software product - if a patent is revealed then the offending code and functionality could be simply removed without so much harm to the usefulness of the product and it can be put back outside the jurisdictions were the patent holds.
2. As you finally said - Rumbas eventually lost their case for what they did. It should happen to MS or anyone else trying to go that way.
3. As I said about the SCO case and Ransom Love's statement - there might be no greater protection to anything included in Novell's Linux product than MS distributing it while knowing that it supports FAT, NTFS, .NET (through Mono) and possibly lots of other stuff - MS can't sell this stuff then turn around and say "it's illegal".
4. So far there are no known MS patents in the Linux code - all your arguments are based on things that *might* happen, and things that *can* happen regardless of the agreement with Novell at that.
This is just an example of a company that abused the patent system for years.
It opponents were not RedHat, Suse or some IGLU members, but some pretty
big corporates (Infineon, Hyundai, etc.) and still, it managed to manipulate
them for some 6 years in a very lucrative market.
On what grounds are you trying to "enumerate" the patents in
NTFS (zero as you said), FAT or .NET? What MS said in the PR?
Some good assurances indeed...
1. Based on what Novell said after signing an agreement with MS.
2. Based on what the latest entry into the NTFS-on-Linux fry says (he should be among the first to know if something came up, IMHO). And coming to this - there are multiple efforts about this, including at least one commercial product mentioned in Wikipedia, MS haven't touched any of them. Granted it doesn't mean they can't start doing so now but it doesn't have any connection with the Novell agreement.
3. Based on Wikipedia's entry about NTFS [1] - NTFS contains trade secrets, which are not patents.
I have nothing against Novel and they did contribute many good things
to Linux and FOSS in general. They have just made themselves another
pawn in MS powerplay. This pawn will be sacrificed by MS when the time
is right for them (as all the previous had). Until than I intend
to do as you suggested -- wait and see -- But I'll do it from
a safer distance... no Novel advertised technologies...
So does this mean you'll stay away from GNOME, KDE, Mono, Xgl, gcc... or actually - take a look at [2] and see if you can survive without the projects Novell is "actively participating in".
[1] Wikipedia's entry about NTFS (note the link to "trade secret" at the beinning): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
[2] Novell open source involvement: http://developer.novell.com/opensource/
--Amos
