LRO Patent vs. patent free TOE

On Sun, 21 Aug 2005, Leonid Grossman wrote:

> Ahh, I was curious to see if someone will bring this argument up - in
> fact, LRO legal issues do not exist, while TOE legal issues are quite
> big at the moment. I guess this is one of the reasons why OpenRDMA and
> other mainstream industry efforts don't have any provisions for TOE
> support.

Chelsio has assured us that their approach is patent free. They can 
provide details on the legal work done on the issue.

> As I mentioned in Ottawa, there is indeed a patent application filed
> about a year ago for Neterion basic LRO implementation.

Good news for you. But why should Linux support proprietary patented 
technology?

> Anyways, since the application is not granted yet it's probably too
> early to discuss it's future - but if any vendor wants to have peace of
> mind, we can talk and get this out of the way; we are obviously
> motivated to make LRO a de-facto NIC feature (much like TSO and other
> stateless offloads have become).

How much will the permission cost for a hardware vendor to be allowed to 
implement LRO?
 
> Unlike LRO, TOE is covered by number of existing patents and faces
> fundamental legal challenges as we speak, for both OS vendors and IHVs -
> as recent Alacritech/Microsoft/Broadcom lawsuit and settlement just
> clearly demonstrated :-)

That is not true. The proposed implementation is not covered by the 
lawsuit. Chelsio got a legal review before posting the patches to insure 
that this is not the case.
 
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