[fab] /.

[Tom Callaway]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 22:50 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> Attached is an updated draft, probably the final rough draft that I'll be 
> sending out, so I'm really interested in your thoughts, especially on the 
> areas that still have todo's in them.
> 
> I appreciated the comments this morning.
> 
> I'm wrapping this up and sending it to the slashdot editors for them to 
> post on Tuesday.

RE: NTFS

"As far as I know, NTFS is not even patented or patentable. Fedora is
not RedHat as you say, so this old reasoning is not exactly valid for
Fedora. The IBM/SCO saga also cleared the issue about patents in the
mainline kernel."

NTFS is _HEAVILY_ patented. I did the research on this a while back, as
I can afford to be tainted for filesystem coding. The majority of the
patents actually affect the ntfsprogs userspace more than they do the
kernelspace bits, but the kernelspace bits aren't unencumbered either.

Now, we don't really want to say this. The last thing we need to do is
get into a pissing war with /. readers about legal issues.

I'd just say that in the past, Red Hat's lawyers were uncomfortable with
enabling NTFS support in the kernel due to the fact that the
implementation is well patented by Microsoft, who has threatened in the
past to exercise their patent portfolio through litigation. Recently,
the kernel has become protected by the OSI (insert nice canned words
about what the OSI is), and we're currently considering (or we are)
enabling NTFS support in our kernels.

*** We should just go ahead and have davej enable it for FC-6. OSI's got
our back on this one. Not that it's terribly useful without ntfsprogs
(and the most recent ntfs support is done entirely in userspace via
fuse), but it would shut up the idiots. ***

~spot