On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, James Knott wrote:
cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org wrote:
As the title says. Impact on Linux ?
If the claims are true, that there are "live" patents still in place on FAT, then it is conceivable that there might be patent infringments, or at least places where MSFT could _claim_ that there are.
Of course, FAT is pretty much derivative of CP/M filesystems, so it is more than likely that any conceivable patents would have to have been filed in the '80s, and thus would have, at most, 3 more years to run.
The only place I use FAT, is on systems that also run Windows. So, if those partitions are created by Windows and just happen to be accessed by Linux, would that be a patent violation?
In theory the code in Linux that allows you to access them is in breach (because a software patent grants them control on a file format and any method related to it) but ianal. I think that this has to do with recent advances in linux that allow r/w access to ntfs. Peter -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml