Yes Andre, they did, they accussed me of knowingly conspiring with Linus
to provide full NTFS on Linux based on the email you and I sent to
them. The agreements they signed with us were very liberal, and allowed
us to create any tools and NTFS stuff we wanted, there were no
non-competes, or anything to stop us from providing stuff on Linux.
What they alleged was a belief that since we were going open source and
supporting Linux NTFS users, they believed it was impossible for me to
keep a "chinese wall" in place in my head between their IP and Linux
IP. A very valid example of the legal theory of the "doctrine of
inevitable disclosure".
But I must admit, in fact what's going on here is that by pulling the
open source NDS for W2K off the table, I renigged on a "faustian"
agreement to open source NDS on W2K. This was compounded by the fact
that we released the MANOS sources with a complete NT/W2K PE and DLL
loader (which we wrote "clean room", one of their old tricks). They
found this very irritating. They were quite unconcerned about our NTFS
work on Linux until we posted MANOS and announced an Open Source
NetWare.
We've started our "clean room" NTFS core and I've spent some late nights
working on it, and we doubt they will take any action since we dissolved
the agreement. The last thing they need is for me to take the stand and
testify just what kind of deals they offered to get us to leave Novell
in 1997 and divide the NetWare markets by using the "Linux IP
Laundry-Mat" to launder Novell's NDS for their consumption (Oh! Look
what we found on the internet and downloaded today!).
NDS would be a useless wart on the rump of Linux. It's for managing
large numbers of file and print servers, not internet/intranet servers
like Linux. Linux already has vastly superior internet directory
capabilities.
:-)
Jeff
:-)
Jeff
Andre Hedrick wrote:
>
> Wait they attacked you after the request for cross over support?
>
> On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Cesar,
> >
> > Microsoft has threatened us with litigation due to our support of Linux
> > NTFS development, and we have dissolved our NTFS licensing agreements
> > with Microsoft in response to their demands that cease to support Linux
> > development. Microsoft demanded that we delete any and all NTFS tools
> > we had been providing to customers based on their intellectual
> > property. As a result of this, we can no longer provide this tool in
> > the United States. There are folks on the linux list, however, who can
> > provide assistance, so I am forwarding you there.
> >
> > Jeff Merkey
> > CEO, TRG
> >
> >
> > "César F. Acebal" wrote:
> > >
> > > Dear Sir:
> > >
> > > I have just seen your message in the Linux Kernel Archive. The true is
> > > that I have damaged my NTFS partition of Windows 2000 Server, and I was
> > > wondering if there were a chance to recover the information on it (it
> > > was all my data there, and I have no emergency repair disk).
> > >
> > > Can you help abot this, please?
> > >
> > > Thank you very much in advance!
> > >
> > > César F. Acebal
> > > acebal@ieee.org
> > -
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> >
>
> Andre Hedrick
> The Linux ATA/IDE guy
>
> -
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 15 2000 - 21:00:24 EST