OASIS patent policy sparks boycott

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OButterball has got it. ...mostly.

I think Michael Kelly has it better.

It is like when MS moved away from HPFS which NT4 could read, along with OS/2 and a DOS driver for it was released. I knew one Linux distro some time back that could be installed on it. I loaded a test Novell server on my HPFS partition although, I did have Novell for OS/2.

MS moved away from HPFS not because it was inferior to NTFS, nor because it was 16-bit and not 32-bit but because NTFS meant Windows only. Even Win2k can read and be installed on HPFS but you have to use some other OS to partition and format the drive first then have Windows installed. I heard a rumor that WinXP and Win2k3 can read but not write HPFS but my understanding is that Win2k was the last of the HPFS compats.

HPFS was object-oriented, extensible and fast. Some argued that it was lacking security but on the contrary, it allowed the installation of the security methods of your choosing through its object-oriented nature. I had security on my OS/2 Warp 3 through a third party vendor and it was, IMHO, more secure than NTFS. Let's put it this way, no one who tried was able to get data off of my HDD by installing it in their system, regardless of the tools they had.

That was another money-maker for me on campus, the virus challenge being the more popular. People would pay for the opportunity to attempt to read the data in a certain plain text file on my HDD. The more info I gave them about my file system, the less the return should they succeed. They take my hdd or tower (their choice) on Friday night at 7:00pm and return it Saturday by 2:00pm. They have untill Monday at 5:00pm to produce the content of the file. If they made it, they would get 2-10 times their bet. I never had to pay out. Now this was 1992-97 we're talking. Maybe now it can be done easier.

The point is, MS uses NTFS as another lock-in. Why dual boot if your choice is either no access to your data--NTFS-- or an unsecure file system --FAT32? "Open Standard" suggests that not only is the means universally accepted but universally implementable. If the patent holder of NFS or CDFS allows all platforms to read and write to it without paying royalties then it is an Open Standard. If CDFS has a restricted patent then it may be a standard for CD-ROM data but clearly not open.

This does leave developers open to develop a new, open fs for CD-ROM's provided that writing such a file system to a CD-R is not prohibited by the hw standard interface. My understanding --which may be erred-- is that pretty much all CD-R/RW burners can write raw data to a disk and so, IDE codecs not withstanding, such an undertaking is possible. But if the IDE codecs handles all of that anyway, who needs to?

The problem is that NTFS is not a function of the HDD nor the IDE. The CD-ROM may be patented --has that patent expired yet-- and the CD-ROM makers may have to pay royalties but the CDFS system is universally implementable for all CD-ROM drives on any OS It is OS independent. Furthermore, no OS or end-user has to use a CD-ROM drive. There are other Optical and MO drives they can use.

Likewise, no OS has to use NTFS when their is ext, etx3, ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, etc. The problem is that Windows is the only OS that cannot access any of the open Fs' and NTFS is the only FS that no other OS can freely access. Therein lies the crux of the matter. Neither Windows nor NTFS are open standards and so, having developed many open FS' that are superior to NTFS, their should be no reason why any open OS should even want to use NTFS natively and until MS opens it --doubt it will happen-- then open OS must stay away from it. Let MS come to us or stay away, their choice but we should not have to run to them. THey abandoned HPFS and choose a closed system. Let them have their closed system or embrace us like so many others are doing.

Posted by: The King's Servant   Posted on: 02/22/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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