Re: Fwd: Some embedded topics

[Tim Bird <tim.bird@am.sony.com>]

Marco Stornelli wrote:
> There's a MontaVista patent on PRAMFS and I think that most of times 
> when a company hears this thing it skips quickly this solution.

Hmmm.  I don't recall anything about a patent on PRAMFS.

There are lots of issues here, but I think it's OK to use.
At a minimum,  MontaVista's PRAMFS was submitted to the CE Linux Forum
in an older kernel (2.4.20-based).  MontaVista was well-aware
of this submission (although it did not come directly from them).
MV was under an IP agreement with CELF which required them to
disclose such patents to the forum, and none was received.

In any event (and without wanting to start a large off-topic legal
thread here), some lawyers would interpret the knowing publication
of an implementation embodying a patent under the GPL to be an
implicit license of use for the patent.

YMMV. IANAL.  Seek your own counsel on this.

> Sometimes ago I sent a porting to 2.6.24, but I didn't receive any 
> response.

I'd love to see this.  Did this go to LKML?  If so, about when?
(Alternatively, could you make it available somewhere?)

Thanks,
  -- Tim

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Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
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