On Sunday, 12 בNovember 2006 12:10, Amos Shapira wrote:
> PLEASE DO YOUR RESEARCH - the NTFS isn't covered by any patent,

You determinism has nothing to build upon. Some reading will
help put your claims into proper perspective:

  "Like a submarine, it stays under water, i.e., unpublished, for long,
   then emerges, i.e., granted and published, and surprises the whole
   market."
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent

It's not MS specific at all. For a totally unrelated example you
may search for "Rambus", "DRAM", "patents". To save readers time:

 * Rambus sued every DRAM producer in the last 6 years for
   patents covering SDRAM, RDRAM, DDR, DDR2 (and collected royalties).

 * All companies on the market used this technologies, since they
   were standardized in the 1990's by "Joint Electron Device Engineering
   Council".

 * Of course Rambus was one of the members in this body.
   Of course they didn't mention they are silently planting their
   patents in the standard interfaces (you cannot produce DRAM
   that interface with standard electronics without infringing these
   patents).

 * Big companies fought Rambus in court claiming fraud and lost.
   (fraud is a crime and rightfully requires stronger evidence than
   a simple civil case). This didn't affect the validity of their
   patents of course, so they kept suing and collecting royalties.

 * It may make you happy to know that finally:
   "FTC Reverses Itself, Blasts Rambus for Creating Unlawful Monopoly"
   
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060802142411821&mode=print

   Hmmm... but this happend only on August-2006!

This is just an example of a company that abused the patent system for years.
It opponents were not RedHat, Suse or some IGLU members, but some pretty
big corporates (Infineon, Hyundai, etc.) and still, it managed to manipulate
them for some 6 years in a very lucrative market.

On what grounds are you trying to "enumerate" the patents in
NTFS (zero as you said), FAT or .NET? What MS said in the PR?
Some good assurances indeed...


I have nothing against Novel and they did contribute many good things
to Linux and FOSS in general. They have just made themselves another
pawn in MS powerplay. This pawn will be sacrificed by MS when the time
is right for them (as all the previous had). Until than I intend
to do as you suggested -- wait and see -- But I'll do it from
a safer distance... no Novel advertised technologies...

-- 
Oron Peled                             Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
ICQ UIN: 16527398

c:\winnt> secure_nt.exe
  Securing NT.  Insert Linux boot disk to continue......
                             --David Brumley

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