Since Linux's algorithm for generating short names differs,

Posted Jan 15, 2006 15:15 UTC (Sun) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494)
In reply to: Prior Art? by wookey
Parent article: Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

does that imply that the patent doesn’t touch our implementation?

IIRC (and that’s a long range recall), our implementation doesn’t use the braindead blah~N notation, but guesses more reasonable abbreviations. It would, OTOH, read the blah~N stupidity just as well as its own names (and so would Microsoft's implementation read ours). So is that an implementation of the stupid patent or not?

If it is, then I reckon that we can argue for UMSDOS being prior art for the process. If it isn’t, then the problem goes away.

Goes away for everyone, that is, since other OSes can simply write their own name-guessing algorithms to avoid paying Mr Patent Farmer his “protection” money.