Micro$oft wins patent case.What does this mean for the linux

dookiesmack · Post by **dookiesmack** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 3:25 pm

Now that micro$oft has won its FAT patent case in court, what does this decision mean for all linux distros??? Or will this even affect the linux community?

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 3:27 pm

Microsoft could probably charge license fees for the use of the FAT file system, the kernel developers could just take it out!

EXT2 is better than FAT anyway

Someone needs to write a good Windows and Mac EXT2/3 driver

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 3:46 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:EXT2 is better than FAT anyway

Doesn't matter FAT is the most universal fs right now so taking it away when it is so widely used is going to have some big consequences

Tsuroerusu wrote:Someone needs to write a good Windows and Mac EXT2/3 driver

You honestly think MS is just going to let another crossplatform filesystem be used with Windows? Its going to take a lot of hack and MS will keep releasing updates that render it useless. Companies are not going to want to rely on hacks unfortunatly which puts MS right at the top where it wants, clinging on for dear life to their position (from my post on digg didn't feel like retyping it

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 3:56 pm

CptnObvious999 wrote:Doesn't matter FAT is the most universal fs right now so taking it away when it is so widely used is going to have some big consequences

Yeah, but who would pay the potential patent royalties for Linux and BSD?

CptnObvious999 wrote:You honestly think MS is just going to let another crossplatform filesystem be used with Windows?

Well, if they don't, I think that would violate their settlement with the DoJ.

CptnObvious999 wrote:Its going to take a lot of hack and MS will keep releasing updates that render it useless.

LOL, it doesn't take a hack to write a driver, if it did, why can NVIDIA and ATi create drivers?

CptnObvious999 wrote:Companies are not going to want to rely on hacks unfortunatly which puts MS right at the top where it wants, clinging on for dear life to their position

Well, either write a stable driver for Windows to support EXT2 or pay royalties to Microsoft.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 4:16 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:
CptnObvious999 wrote:You honestly think MS is just going to let another crossplatform filesystem be used with Windows?
Well, if they don't, I think that would violate their settlement with the DoJ.

I think so.

Tsuroerusu wrote:
CptnObvious999 wrote:Its going to take a lot of hack and MS will keep releasing updates that render it useless.
LOL, it doesn't take a hack to write a driver, if it did, why can NVIDIA and ATi create drivers?

If MS made it hard to install the drivers for the other fs then yes it would take a hack. MS wants NVIDIA and ATI to have drivers for Windows so it won't stop them.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 4:17 pm

CptnObvious999 wrote:If MS made it hard to install the drivers for the other fs then yes it would take a hack. MS wants NVIDIA and ATI to have drivers for Windows so it won't stop them.

How in the world would they prevent people from installing drivers with their current security infrastructure? They can't dude, and it wouldn't be legal for them to do if a Thumbdrive maker actually used EXT2.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 4:35 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:
CptnObvious999 wrote:If MS made it hard to install the drivers for the other fs then yes it would take a hack. MS wants NVIDIA and ATI to have drivers for Windows so it won't stop them.
How in the world would they prevent people from installing drivers with their current security infrastructure? They can't dude, and it wouldn't be legal for them to do if a Thumbdrive maker actually used EXT2.

They own all the code, they might be able to block it. Why wouldn't it be legal if a thumbdrive maker used EXT2?

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 4:42 pm

CptnObvious999 wrote:They own all the code, they might be able to block it.
Again that is anti-compeditive and would be a violating of their anti-trust settlement.

CptnObvious999 wrote:Why wouldn't it be legal if a thumbdrive maker used EXT2?

Did I say that was illegal? If you understood a sentence of mine that way, well my fault then. Anyone can use EXT2, I don't know the exactly terms, I presume it's GPL or BSD-licensed, but anyone can certainly use it, it's just about installing a driver in Windows so it could read it, it would probably be a single .sys and a single .inf file.

Post by **dann** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 9:01 pm

This looks like a direct attack against F/OSS. Realistically speaking, the proposed royality payment, what $0.25 US per device with a cap of $200,000 US is a drop in the bucket for any hardware manufacturer. They'll simply pass the cost on to the consumer which means the end user is going to be paying twice for the use of the same technology.

As for hardware vendors switching to an open file system? Again, I doubt it. FAT has become the standard. It's readable by Windows and OS X and that is all they really care about. Again, the cost will utimately be coming out of the consumers pocket, so why switch?

Windows will be able to read FAT and I would suspect OS X will license this capability too. Perhaps some commercial versions of Linux (i.e.; SuSE, RedHat) will bundle this capability; but for the rest of us, it's going to go the route of video codecs: Illegal to install.

Thus, they have effectively ruined the "you can download it for free" appeal of Linux is a lot of areas. This becomes another hurdle in getting someone or a company/institution to adopt Linux on the desktop.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 9:09 pm

Damn them making it affordable is just logical enough to work. To small for any hardware vendors to care while locking out linux and making some money off it. Bill Gates if your reading this THE LEGAL SYSTEM WAS CREATED TO PROTECT PEOPLES RIGHTS NOT TO CONTROL THE WORLD WITH!

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Tue Jan 24, 2006 12:05 am

Yeah, well, F*ck Bill Gates. If he wants his quarter from me, he can come and get it himself. It'd be worth $.25 for me to meet him face to face so I could give a swift kick to his nards..... The glasses wearing, pie eatin', pimply face poindexter.

Besides, there's always non-U.S. based Linux distros that the community can draw upon. Take Canada, for example.... you cannot patent software here, so I'm sure there's some loop-hole that the open source community could exploit there.

Maybe distributions could be hosted on servers in Russia. Hell, it works for MP3s!

The arm of the U.S. legal system is long... but it ain't that long.

jsusanka · Post by **jsusanka** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 9:32 am

here is a nice ext2 driver for windows that lets you read write to ext2 file systems.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

I already had my usb storage converted to ext2 since I don't use windows and fat is lame anyway - and if I have to plug into a windows machine it will be just one more obstacle for viruses to overcome.

to me there still has to be some kind of legal precedence - how can they start charging fees after 30 some odd years of not caring who uses fat.
I am not a lawyer but something just doesn't smell right with that one.