VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jul 8, 2009 11:17 UTC (Wed) by fergal (guest, #602)
In reply to: VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds by nix
Parent article: VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

I don't see how it wouldn't crimp our style discussing anything to do with the scheduler forevermore. How are we going to discuss LFN issues of any sort in VFAT in the open from now on? As far as I can tell, we pretty much can't.

You can discuss almost everything. Just don't publicly say "hey I don't think this does work around the patent because ...". If you think you've found a flaw in the legal reasoning, send a private email. You probably also shouldn't send a patch for purely legal reasons and discuss them in public.

That leaves everyone who is likely to do any work on LFN reasonably free to do it and discuss it in public.

VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jul 8, 2009 18:16 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, we've already seen "don't discuss details of the implementation of
this patch: $PERSON will send you a private email explaining the design"
(and then he apparently doesn't, at least not yet) which means that if
this patch goes in we have opaque design decisions in the kernel for the
sake of a single (large) country's appalling legal regime. Great stuff.

I wonder what can't-discuss-it code will be going in for the Chinese
government next? They're hot on Linux and China has a much bigger
population than the US.