It's safer if they don't.
Unless Microsoft licenses it under a license with the most explicit and extensive protections against patent lawsuits.
Unless Microsoft licenses it under a license with the most explicit and extensive protections against patent lawsuits.
As a bonus, the availability of this code might make prior art challenges to extant patents much easier.
The bigger concern would be copyright. That might be a fairly plausible argument for why FreeDOS developers shouldn't be reading this source. Though realistically the odds that Microsoft would actually pursue such a case are remote at best.
The chance that you are going to get MSDOS expressive structures in FreeDOS in a way that is even arguably beyond deminimis is nil. You don't usually just move code between implementations easily, and chances are pretty good that the FreeDOS folks use fairly different approaches than the MSDOS folks. The argument is that if you read the code you might be tainted, but I don't see this as a significant argument here for software that's 30 years old.
Yeah, but usually you cannot get extensions THAT easily, and extensions are limited in time. I don't think you can expect extensions to last too long either (at most you can add a couple of years of exclusivity).
Now exFAT is much more recently encumbered.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/24/business/microsoft-loses-c...
> The Patents and Trademark Office, which began issuing software patents only a decade ago, has been accused of having inadequate expertise in software to judge what is truly novel.
Nice to know nothing has changed in a decade.
While thinking about it a little more deeply let's give them the benefit of doubt for five minutes and assume they did hire a bunch of geeks to do this. Is there any possibility the problem simply can't be solved easily? What seems complex and patentable today may in fact seem completely obvious and novel in ten years when it actually shows up in court or even just 5 years from now once it finally gets reviewed and accepted.
In searching for prior art, is it actually possible to go back in time on the wayback machine and check for these types of obvious issues with the claim?
Something to think about anyway. Disclosure: kiwi here. We did some form of reform already, havtn t noticed anything adverse thus far.
Would be interested to hear if anyone has come across problems yet.