Kernel 2.6 options that should be used on Fedora Core 2

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Martin Mewes <mm at mewes.tv> said:
Content-Description: signed data
> Am Freitag, 19. Dezember 2003 17:54 schrieb Chris Adams:
> > Yes it is.  The fact that parts of NTFS are covered by patents
> > means that you can't distribute it legally without a patent
> > license.
> 
> If it really would be like this, the complete Samba-Team must have 
> been jailed because they just listened to network traffic between 
> MS-Servers and -Clients in order to built their product.

That is reverse engineering, which is legal (at least for now, some are
trying to outlaw it).  If parts of the protocol are covered by patents
however, they could not release anything implementing what the same
protocol they observed (which would mean they couldn't release anything
that interoperated with the Microsoft implementations).  Reverse
engineering protects against copyright violation, but not patent
violation.

> > > Kernel-Support goes for incorporating a GPLed kind of
> > > NTFS-reading.
> >
> > That can't be done without a patent license or a patent violation.
> 
> Yes, it can. You have to analyse what NTFS does and built a r/o-thing 
> with your own ideas. This does not mean that you incorporate another 
> FileSystem named ntfs4linux (ie) to Linux.

Patents cover ideas and methods, not actual implementations (copyright
covers a specific implementation of something).  If it requires that you
add 1 and 1 to get 2 to read an NTFS filesystem, and Microsoft has
patented that adding 1 and 1 results in 2, you cannot write your own
code that adds 1 and 1 and gets 2 (so you can't read an NTFS
filesystem).

Think of it this way: Xerox had a patent on photocopying.  That meant
that even if you came up with photocopying on your own (without even
looking at or hearing about a Xerox machine) that was similar to the way
Xerox did it, you could not sell your own photocopying equipment unless
you had a patent license from Xerox or until that patent expired.

I am not a lawyer; you should go read up on patents, copyrights, and
trademarks (commonly referred to together as "intellectual property",
although they are quite different concepts).  Check out reverse
engineering as well.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.