On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 10:42:21PM -0500, cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org wrote:

What is Highly Curious is the fact that Atari was selling systems based on FAT filesystems probably fifteen years ago, and were never attacked for this.

What is VERY interesting is that none of the patents in question have to do with the filesystem. They ALL have to do with the way DOS 6 started providing support for longer filenames. The patents date back to 1996, and every single one is about filenaming.

That would be DOS 7 (aka win95). No version prior to Win95 (OR if you ran NT) could do long filenames on FAT. I think OS/2 had a way to do it though.

1 6,286,013 Method and system for providing a common name space for long and short file names in an operating system

2 5,758,352 Common name space for long and short filenames

3 5,745,902 Method and system for accessing a file using file names having different file name formats

4 5,579,517 Common name space for long and short filenames

How many patents can they have for the same thing anyhow? Lennart Sorensen -- 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