On 12/25/2010 12:16 PM, joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:
Erik Trimble<erik.trim...@oracle.com> wrote:
I've read Joerg's paper, and I've read several of the patents in
question, and nowhere around is there any real code. A bit of
Netapp filed patents (without code) in 1993, I of course have working code for
SuinOS-4.9 from 1991. Se below for more information.
Joerg - your paper used to be available here (which is where I read it
awhile ago), but not anymore:
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/wofs.ps.gz
I just re-looked, and I now remember that I got it from that URL via the
Internet Archive (www.internet.org). It's still available at the URL
above from 2001 at the Archive.
This address did go away in 2001 when the German government enforced
integration of GMD into Fraunhofer.
The old postscript version (created from troff) is here:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/wofs.ps.gz
A few years ago, a friend helped me to add the images that originally have been
created outside of troff and inserted the old way (using glue). Since 2006,
there is a pdf version that includes the images:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/WoFS.pdf
Is there a better location? (and, a full English translation? I read
it in German, but my German is maybe at 7th-grade level, so I might have
missed some subtleties...)
There is currently no English tranlation and as a result of the legal situation
in 1991, I could not publish the related implementation. Even getting the
SunOS-4.0 source code in 1988 in order to allow the implementation, was a bit
tricky. Horst Winterhoff (Chief Sun Germany and Sun Europe) asked Bill Joy for
a permission to give away the source for my Diploma Thesis. As a result of
this and the fact that there was no official howto from Sun for writing
filesystems, I was forced to keep the implementation unpublished (as for the
implementation of mmap() in wofs, I was forced to copy aprox. 100 lines from
the UFS code).
If the code you copied is currently still in the OpenSolaris codebase,
then you're OK. But, the SunOS codebase is significantly different than
the Solaris one, so I wouldn't automatically assume that you can publish
that code. Though, if your borrowing was restricted to the UFS
implementation (and not the Virtual Memory/Filesystem caching stuff),
your chances are good that it's still in the OpenSolaris codebase.
Since June 2005, I would asume that the situation is different and there is no
longer a problem to publish the WOFS source. If people are interested, I could
publish the unedit original state from 1991 (including the SCCS history for my
implementation) even though it looks a bit messy.
For at least historical reasons, that would be nice. Though, I don't
want to offer legal advice as to the possibility of problems,
particularly for someone outside the US system. :-)
I tried to verify whether the submission of the diploma thesis in 1991 is an
official publication and in theory it should be, as a copy is stored in the
univertity library. Unfortunately, the university library is uanble to find the
paper. There are however many people who could confirm that the development
really happened between 1988 and 1991.
If your thesis paper was available via Lexisnexis, then, it certainly
should count as officially published for any legal system. If not, I
suspect that different countries would have different standards for
university thesis.
Maybe, it is a good idea to send a mail to someone from eff.org?
Jörg
Yup. They'd be the right people to talk to.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
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