Tim Bird ha scritto:
Marco Stornelli wrote:
There's a MontaVista patent on PRAMFS and I think that most of times
when a company hears this thing it skips quickly this solution.
Hmmm. I don't recall anything about a patent on PRAMFS.
There are lots of issues here, but I think it's OK to use.
At a minimum, MontaVista's PRAMFS was submitted to the CE Linux Forum
in an older kernel (2.4.20-based). MontaVista was well-aware
of this submission (although it did not come directly from them).
MV was under an IP agreement with CELF which required them to
disclose such patents to the forum, and none was received.
In any event (and without wanting to start a large off-topic legal
thread here), some lawyers would interpret the knowing publication
of an implementation embodying a patent under the GPL to be an
implicit license of use for the patent.
YMMV. IANAL. Seek your own counsel on this.
Sometimes ago I sent a porting to 2.6.24, but I didn't receive any
response.
I'd love to see this. Did this go to LKML? If so, about when?
(Alternatively, could you make it available somewhere?)
Thanks,
-- Tim
=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
=============================
From MontaVista site:
"...File system designed by MontaVista Software for embedded systems -
MontaVista has a patent pending on this code, but is licensing the
patent freely for use in GPL software."
I agree with you Tom and Rob but I meant that especially for a little
company only reading "patent pending" can be dread, and you know that
legal arguments can be long and expensive.
About my patch, I sent an email to Steve Longerbeam on March because I
read his name on the pramfs sourceforge project page. Now I haven't the
patch anymore, however the latest patch is for 2.6.10 and the porting to
2.6.24 was easy because there weren't a lot of differences.
Regards.
--
Marco Stornelli
Embedded Software Engineer
CoRiTeL - Consorzio di Ricerca sulle Telecomunicazioni
http://www.coritel.it
marco.stornelli@xxxxxxxxxx
+39 06 72582838
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