Re: [PATCH] Add CONFIG_VFAT_NO_CREATE_WITH_LONGNAMES option

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 06:37:29PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 05:01:09PM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > >From the complete lack of technical arguments it's pretty obvious that
> > this seems to be some FUD fallout from the MS vs TomTom patent lawsuite.
> > 
> > I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how much of a threat it is.  But either
> > the case gets shot down by showing prior art and everything is fine, or
> > we indeed are in deep trouble and should remove it completely.  Given
> > the Cc list on here IBM seems to have some legal opinion on it, so can
> > we please see it and discuss what we want to with all cards on the
> > table?
> 
> Hello, Christoph!
> 
> Hmmm...  Both Tridge and Dave have Signed-off-by on the original patch,
> and Steve has Acked-by, Mingming has Cc, and Dave is on the From list
> rather than the Cc list, so I have to guess that there is a good chance
> that you are talking about me.  ;-)
> 
> However, as far as I know, none of us are lawyers, and LKML is definitely
> a technical rather than a legal forum, so we really do need to stick to
> technical topics.  I understand that this might be a bit frustrating
> to you.  On the other hand, I for one much prefer being in a forum
> restricted to technical topics than to be in those places designed to
> handle legal topics!

So what's the purely technical argument for including this patch?

-- 
Matthew Wilcox				Intel Open Source Technology Centre
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this
operating system, but compare it to ours.  We can't possibly take such
a retrograde step."