[Mono-list] RE: Mono-list digest, Vol 1 #287 - 19 msgs

[Dennis Hayes]

> Microsoft can't just make Samba illegal... can they?
> Are they saying that no one can use Samba ever again?  I can't believe
> that such a license is possible.

Actually, the patents have been there a long time. Samba has always been
illegal! I saw an article interviewing the creator of samba (I think it was
linked form this email list) when the last big patents and Mono argument was
going on. He (the creator of Samba) said he was flagrantly violating
Microsoft's patent on CIFS, but have never had any problem from MS about it.
About two days later MS opened up the protocol to non GPL license.

>From the patents, I can't figure out what it is they are actually claiming.
>Either it is all networked file systems, in which case they were a few
>decades behind the times, or it is some very specific arrangement
>and technique for implementing SMB, in which case it just doesn't matter.
>If you are working on CIFS, you should read and try to understand the
>patents.  If not, don't worry about it and just chalk it up to another
>heavy-handed attempt by Microsoft to keep people from competing with them.

From what I could gather from the patent it covers "Raw" data transfers from
application to application. from the application's point of view the data is
moved to/from the applications memory. I think this might be the FileSend
API that eliminates coping the data from user memory to kernel memory before
sending it.
I do not really understand this, so I may be wrong on many counts.
Dennis


--__--__--