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

[Hadron]

Rex Ballard <rex.ballard@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.

>
> 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?