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 Some reading will help put your claims into proper perspective: "Like a submarine, it stays under water, i.e., unpublished, for long, then emerges, i.e., granted and published, and surprises the whole market."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 ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]