On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 11:22:20AM -0700, Dan Hollis wrote:
>
> On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Matias Féliciano wrote:
>
> > Potential patent problem.
>
> Which patent number please? I asked redhat employees several years ago and
> got no response. I'd love to know.
If you had read Matias' response, you would have noticed the word 'potential'.
There doesn't actually need to be a known patent problem, only the threat
of one. The one thing that SCO has proved with its case against IBM is that
any company can make a bullshit claim against a Linux vendor and then make
them rack up legal fees for 18+ months.
While IBM has the amount of money to do this (and squash SCO like a bug when
they're finished), I'm not sure Red Hat does.
Even if they did, I'm pretty confident that nobody here wishes Red Hat to
be sued for violating patents. So they avoid the issue by not shipping
the ntfs module.
Feel free to disagree with them on this issue. You can get a different
distribution, get rpms for the ntfs module from linux-ntfs.sf.net or
from rpm.livna.org or just recompile the kernel yourself.
But Red Hat is taking the legal risks by distributing the rpms, they're
the ones in Microsoft's line of fire. It's their choice. And that makes
it their decision.
Emmanuel