"obviously duplicated" is irrelevant

Posted Jun 30, 2009 18:28 UTC (Tue) by ianw (guest, #20143)
In reply to: "obviously duplicated" is irrelevant by JesseW
Parent article: VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

I realise the issue is not duplication here, but how could a reasonable person not just roll their eyes and sigh if two lawyers were standing in-front of you duking it out over how completely different their VFAT implementations are (or not) because it slips though a loophole that somehow escaped the prolix that is a software patent.

I completely blame Microsoft, however. By forcing the TomTom issue they showed intent. If the best they can come up with is to sue over a file format vaguely more complicated than what we expect undergraduate students to implement to pass a basic operating systems course, then they are justifiably doomed.

"obviously duplicated" is irrelevant

Posted Jun 30, 2009 21:06 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Have you *seen* VFAT? If an undergraduate student implemented something
that ugly he'd get a C, max.

(Of course, nobody wanted it to be so ugly. VFAT is the way it is because
of back-compatibility with a bunch of now-dead systems...)