Re: Tom Tom and Microsofts Linux patent lock-down ..

[Rex Ballard]

On Mar 16, 5:54 pm, Hadron <hadronqu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Rex Ballard <rex.ball...@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Mar 14, 4:06 pm, Doug Mentohl <doug_ment...@linuxmail.org> wrote:
> >> 'Microsoft's got a long history of licensing its File Allocation
> >> Table/Long File Name (FAT LFN) with companies in the car navigation
> >> space and that have specifically been using Linux and open source'

> > Linux had LFN for FAT back in 1993.   Microsoft didn't introduce it
> > until Windows 95.

> Wrong. NT had it first.

I distinctly remember that as a big "Missing" in Windows NT 3.1.
When exactly was Long File Names for FAT introduced?

And was it NTFS or HPFS who had long names first?  Remember,
it was IBM who "owned" HPFS.  Microsoft bought an unlimited
distribution license to the OS/2 code it had "aquired" (embezzled)
from IBM and used in NT.

> > Even before that was Sun PCNFS, which had it back in 1988-ish.
>
> > Pat Volkerding had a fully functional LFN for FAT back in Slackware
> > 1.0, allowing Linux users to use FAT file systems for Linux files.
>
> > Microsoft seems not to have noticed that there are more than a few
> > similarities between how Linux did it in 1993 and how Microsoft
> > finally did it in 1995.  Keep in mind that Microsoft's code was
> > carefully guarded as trade secret, while the Linux code was published
> > in source code format.  The preponderance of the evidence says that it
> > was Microsoft that stole from Linux, not the other way around.  The
> > patent should be nullified, and the code should be published as Open
> > Source.
>
> >> 'Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of
> >> intellectual property and licensing Horacio Gutierrez said 18 companies
> >> had signed up, including Kenwood, Alpine, and Pioneer'
>
> > Just because they agreed to be part of Microsoft's "patent umbrella"
> > which protects them from patent troll whiplash lawyers, doesn't
> > necessarily mean that Microsoft has the right to enforce the patents.
> > Quite the opposite, if the patent application was fraudulent, and
> > failed to mention the pre-existing GPL code, the patent itself could
> > be nullified, or awarded to the prior author.  That's the ugly problem
> > with Software Patents.  Just because you were "first to file" doesn't
> > mean that you have the right to poach other people's work.
>
> > For most of 30 years, Microsoft has depended on trade secrets,
> > proprietary code, copyright laws and licenses that strictly forbade
> > reverse engineering of code.
>
> Uh huh.
>
> So Wine is a figment of our imagination eh Rexx "Kingmaker" Ballard?

WINE was based on publicly accessible information, including marketing
information, magazine articles, court records, and other forms of
publicly available information.  It's one of the reasons that WINE
doesn't work all that well.  The big challenge with bug fixes to WINE
is that they can't dig into the caller's code to do root cause
analysis.  They have to tell WINE to print out some debug messages and
describe the parameters passed to figure out what went wrong.

Ironically, there are several products which combine WINE with
Microsoft Licensed software.  CrossOver and Win4Lin are two examples
of companies who licensed Microsoft's software libraries to be able to
more effectively run Microsoft applications.  Applications based on
VB4 don't need Microsoft licenses.  Applications based on VB5 or above
require vbrun libraries which must be licensed from Microsoft.  Often
the licenses are even more than the OEM licenses for Windows.