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Re: [Qemu-devel] [edk2] EDK II & GPL - Re: OVMF BoF @ KVM Forum 2015


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [edk2] EDK II & GPL - Re: OVMF BoF @ KVM Forum 2015
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2015 20:40:04 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.2.0

On 09/10/2015 08:14 PM, Kevin Davis wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 10/09/2015 16:24, Kevin Davis wrote:
>>> Further leading me to guess that any actual use of those
>>> implementations could lead to you actually needing to hire a real
>>> attorney and not one that you find on YouTube.
>>
>> The good thing is that attorneys have already figured it out.  IBM figured 
>> out
>> a few years ago how to work around Microsoft's patents, and that's how
>> FAT32 (and more specifically long file names) are implemented in Linux.
> 
> Ah.  I wasn't in the room when they figured it out.  And I've never seen 
> their written opinion.  Is it documented somewhere?

A bit of wikipedia reading turns up these indirect documentations of the
solutions:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/07/vfat-linux-patch-could-circumvent-microsofts-patent-claims/
https://web.archive.org/web/20130131034455/http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4980952387.html

which in turn leads to this FAQ:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121116185559/http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/26/314

So reading between the lines, IBM's opinion was that implementing a
workaround that operates FAT in such a way that it never uses a common
namespace was sufficient to avoid any legal questions about whether that
code conflicts with a patent on a common namespace, sidestepping the
longer question of any legal battle over the patent itself.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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