On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 09:30:20AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > That's for the maintainers to decide. If they agree it has worth, maybe > > it's a good idea to answer "How". > > Al and Christoph said essentially the same thing and they generally > are considered the general area filesystem maintainers. Ultimately the folks that is will be primarily making this decision is Ogawa Hirofumi-san, as the FAT/VFAT maintainer, and Linus Torvalds, of course. So I'm not sure this thread is actually all that productive, unless we can move it back to talking about the technical issues. > When all of the pieces are public how can having secret veiled reasons > make sense? Legal reasoning and strategy often needs to be kept confidential. It may not make a lot of sense, but in the real world, lawyers can do a lot of harm (and good) and in their area of expertise, I tend to defer to their judgement, just as I defer to an airplane pilot on how to safely fly me from Boston to Amsterdam. I will observe (again) that Digital Camera manufacturers, and the folks who came up with the DCIM standard, have for the last 10+ years explicitly used a scheme where their cameras do not need to create anything other than 8.3 filenames. So at least for those folks, the FAT Long Filename support is bloat which they don't need or want. Furthermore, their decision to avoid anything other tghan 8.3 filenames goes back far before any patent lawsuits or settlements that people have alleged as being related to the "why" of the patch. Every single digital camera does not need long file names; they all use 8.3 filenames *only* in accordance with the DCIM standard. Is bloat avoidance for digital cameras manufacturers who want to use Linux a good enough reason for you? Note: We don't always ask people for the reason behind why they want, say, cgroups to control I/O throttling for example. They may have a secret business case for how they will be able to leverage that technology with some application stack to make tons and tons of money --- and we don't require that deep motives be revealed in those cases. If the "what" and "how" of the patch makes sense, there is at least one valid use case for the "why", that's often enough. And we ought to consider whether or not the needs of digital camera manfactuers who might have firmware bloat requirements and who have decided over a decade ago that 8.3 filenames were just fine for writing images to flash cards, is a good enough reason. Think of it as a bloatwatch exercise, if that makes you happy. :-) > And if secret magic consultations with lawyers are going to be invoked > I expect we should have a Signed-off-by from those lawyers. That certainly wouldn't make any sense. The lawyers didn't originate the patch, and the code didn't pass through their hands. Maybe a reviewed-by or an acked-by, though. :-) On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 02:53:41PM -0600, Chris Friesen wrote: > >> Or that patent is believed to be invalid and faught, and there was >> absolute no reason to remove it except for companies doing as part of a >> settlement and they could do it in their privat trees. > > What about the scenario where a patent is valid in certain parts of the > world but not in others? It seems possible that in this scenario there > may be valid reasons to have a config option. Quite possibly. Or possibly it's because it is believed that it could be invalidated, which is why OIN is requesting prior art even though the last time to invalidate the patent through prior art was denied by the patent office. (And note, if a patent is challenged, and survives the challenge, it gets stronger by receiving more deference from the courts; and if it survives a second change, it gets even stronger, and can for all practical purposes, become unchallengeable --- which is why you don't challenge patents lightly; so I would imagine the OIN will tread very, **very** carefully before submitting a second challenge to the USPTO --- which is probably why the OIN *has* made a public appeal for as much prior art as people can find; even if they do have some good stuff, you want as much ammunition as you can, potentially since the USPTO has refused to admit they were wrong the first time around.) And in the meantime, perhaps there is a desire not to fuel any FUD as well as not wanting removing very useful functionality that desktop users might care about over bogus patent(s), but at the same time make it easier for companies who might not have the multiple millions of dollars that it takes to defend against a patent lawsuit, whether or not the patent is bullsh*t or not. - Ted P.S. Ob.Disclaimer: The above is my opinion only, and and doesn't necessarily represent IBM or the Linux Foundation's positions, strategies, or opinions. I have not privately discussed this issue with any IBM employee, contractor, or lawyer (i.e., not besides reading the public e-mails on LKML and reading the public Ars Technica articles on the subject). Most of what I know about patents from an semester-long class taught at the MIT Sloan School of Business which covered, quite extensively, Intellectual Property Law. Unfortunately, it's a very good thing for a programmer to be understand; perhaps that says something about the society we live in. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
