On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 14:22, Dan Hollis wrote: > Of course, rdesktop and samba are bundled in fedora, both of which have > _known_ patent problems. Patent numbers please. Wait. Nevermind. I really don't care. *sigh* Here we go again. <CONSPIRACY MODE=ON> Red Hat won't ship MySQL 4.x, NTFS, MP3 codecs, and GIF, for idealogical reasons and nothing else. Red Hat 'cripples' KDE because they're in love with GNOME and want to make KDE look bad. Red Hat sucks. Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux. </CONSPIRACY> People: There are plenty of real problems to identify and squash. We don't need imaginary ones. If you don't like the legal, pragmatic, strategic or otherwise decisions Red Hat makes, then find another distribution. You've been given a reason for NTFS not being built (patent problems). No one at Red Hat is obliged to give you a patent number to convince you. Either believe it and move on, or don't and sulk. If Red Hat employees have time to chase down their legal team and ask so they can give you an answer and update fedorafaq.org, then fine. But I wouldn't hold my breath. > Of course, rdesktop and samba are bundled in fedora, both of which > have > _known_ patent problems. Every situation is unique. Perhaps the samba and rdesktop developers have strategically worked around the problems or mitigated the problems significantly. Or perhaps there's been precendence in the NTFS case, but not the samba or rdesktop cases. Whatever. Citing these to inclusions have near zero relevance to NTFS. IANAL. YANAL. So neither of us can really do a reliable analysis of the situation. I'm not trying to silence mentioning of things like this, but since questions like this get asked a lot and then the accusations begin to fly, I'm asking that people take a different approach rather than endless threads-from-hell. Try just asking if the situation has changed and if no one knows, if someone at Red Hat would be willing to spend a little time hunting down an answer. If the answer is 'no, none of us has time,' then accept it and move on. If you expect more, your potentially asking someone at Red Hat to put his job at risk by going against what Legal has recommended. -- -Paul Iadonisi Senior System Administrator Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist Ever see a penguin fly? -- Try Linux. GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets