Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@oracle.com> wrote: > I've read Joerg's paper, and I've read several of the patents in > question, and nowhere around is there any real code. A bit of
Netapp filed patents (without code) in 1993, I of course have working code for SuinOS-4.9 from 1991. Se below for more information. > pseudo-code and some math, but no full, working code. And, granted that > I'm not a IP lawyer, but it does look like Joerg's work is prior art > (and, given that the standard is supposed to be what someone in the > industry would consider obvious, based on their knowledge, and I think I > qualify). Which all points to the real problem of software patents - > they're really patents on IDEAS, not on a specific implementation. Who > the moron was that really though that was OK (yes, I know who > specifically, but in general...) should be shot. > > Copyright is fine or protecting software work, but patents? > > Joerg - your paper used to be available here (which is where I read it > awhile ago), but not anymore: > http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/wofs.ps.gz This address did go away in 2001 when the German government enforced integration of GMD into Fraunhofer. The old postscript version (created from troff) is here: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/wofs.ps.gz A few years ago, a friend helped me to add the images that originally have been created outside of troff and inserted the old way (using glue). Since 2006, there is a pdf version that includes the images: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/WoFS.pdf > Is there a better location? (and, a full English translation? I read > it in German, but my German is maybe at 7th-grade level, so I might have > missed some subtleties...) There is currently no English tranlation and as a result of the legal situation in 1991, I could not publish the related implementation. Even getting the SunOS-4.0 source code in 1988 in order to allow the implementation, was a bit tricky. Horst Winterhoff (Chief Sun Germany and Sun Europe) asked Bill Joy for a permission to give away the source for my Diploma Thesis. As a result of this and the fact that there was no official howto from Sun for writing filesystems, I was forced to keep the implementation unpublished (as for the implementation of mmap() in wofs, I was forced to copy aprox. 100 lines from the UFS code). Since June 2005, I would asume that the situation is different and there is no longer a problem to publish the WOFS source. If people are interested, I could publish the unedit original state from 1991 (including the SCCS history for my implementation) even though it looks a bit messy. I tried to verify whether the submission of the diploma thesis in 1991 is an official publication and in theory it should be, as a copy is stored in the univertity library. Unfortunately, the university library is uanble to find the paper. There are however many people who could confirm that the development really happened between 1988 and 1991. Maybe, it is a good idea to send a mail to someone from eff.org? Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
