Jeffrey Burns wrote: > This is the first I've heard about the patent issues with ntfs being > resolved and it's very good news. Hopefully Fedora 7 kernels will have > ntfs support enabled by default. It will make it that much easier to > transition my parents and sister to Fedora. They're not so much "resolved" as "we've now got our own nukes, so hopefully we can co-exist". The "Open Invention Network" owns a number of key patents and will assert them, if necessary, against companies that try to use patents against Free Software. http://www.redhat.com/magazine/014dec05/features/oin/ Note that this is absolutely no use against companies that only own patents and try to extract patent royalties from people that use them. But it's probably cheaper for Microsoft to allow NTFS support than it is to start a legal war to have it stopped. I understand that the same portfolio covers Mono. I am not a lawyer, but Mark Webbink, who wrote the article I linked to, is Red Hat's Deputy General Counsel. http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/team/webbink.html Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail: james@ | *No-one* liked the Joshua N'Clement block. The people who aprilcottage.co.uk | lived there thought everyone should be taken out and then | the block should be blown up, and the people who lived | near the block just wanted it blown up. | -- Terry Pratchett
