Re: patent on O_ATOMICLOOKUP [Re: [PATCH] loopable tmpfs (2.4.17)]

Linus Torvalds
2002-05-24T23:28:40Z

On Fri, 24 May 2002, Karim Yaghmour wrote:
>
> This matter remained unchanged until the FSF came out later and
> declared publicly that the patent was violating the GPL.

Side note: they did this, apparently while Caldera was in the process of
suing FSMlabs over the fact that they didn't want to pay for their
OpenUnix usage... Hmm..

> I could have understood that this was indeed genuine, but here we
> have Eben Moglen, a respected lawyer,

I would be a _lot_ happier with Moglen if he didn't have so many ties to
the FSF, and being biased. These days you can apparently buy a "gpl
compliance certification" from the FSF for $20k. Those kinds of ties do
_not_ make me any happier about the FSF's status as an independent entity.

The RT part of an app under RTLinux has to be a kernel module anyway, and
as I personally consider the GPL to be the only kind of module I care
about, I think that is good.

Whatever non-RT tools used to visualize the RT data equally clearly aren't
covered by _that_ particular patent, so I think the whole thing is a
complete and utter red herring.

Linus