Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:06:51 -0700 From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov> To: "David S. Miller" <davem@jenolan.rutgers.edu> Cc: bsdhack@shadows.aeon.net, spidaman@well.com, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Feasibility of porting Linux filesystem code? Message-ID: <199704171706.KAA17594@lestat.nas.nasa.gov>
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On Thu, 17 Apr 1997 06:16:55 -0400 "David S. Miller" <davem@jenolan.rutgers.edu> wrote: > XFS is SGI's bread and butter, if you write a freely available version > of it you'd: > > 1) Have to reverse engineer it completely > 2) Would have a building full of lawyers on your ass > > I know because I investigated such a thing ad nauseum while I was > hacking Linux at SGI, and that was the final word. So, you read the papers that have been published on it, and implement something that does basically the same thing. You only have to "reverse engineer it completely" if you want them to be compatible (i.e. want to be able to plug a disk from your SGI into your PC or whatever). Personally, I don't care about that too much. ...can you point me to the clause in the license that accompanies the IRIX binary distributions which specifically disallows reverse-engineering? In any case, the notion of a journaled, extent-based file system that uses b+ trees rather than bitmaps is a neat idea, but I wouldn't call it patentable (of course, that doens't mean that SGI hasn't _tried_ to patent it; I don't know if they have or not). But, if they haven't, I don't see how they could possibly stop someone from writing a file system based on the same ideas. (Sure, they could be jerks and generally a PITA, but they couldn't _stop_ you...) Jason R. Thorpe thorpej@nas.nasa.gov NASA Ames Research Center Home: 408.866.1912 NAS: M/S 258-6 Work: 415.604.0935 Moffett Field, CA 94035 Pager: 415.428.6939
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