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50K Linux Man Bites At Merkey.net
magnany writes "In a recent article, former TRG CEO Jeff V. Merkey had offered to pay 50K USD for a BSD-licensed Linux. Groklaw did a followup on his offer, to which Jeff responded by notifying the FBI of Groklaw's 'hate crimes violation.' Merkey doesn't exactly have a great record, either, which is made even more apparent by his recent threats to file suit against Merkey.net for slander and trademark infringement, amongst others. In addition, he has also reported Merkey.net to the FBI's hate crime department. What could Merkey.net do to get Jeff V. Merkey off their backs?"
After weeks of spreading FUD to the point you would think the guy is mentally challenged, he posted what might be seen as an apology:
l /0410.3/0506.html
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kerne
Actually, the hate crime law mentions nothing about being "a fucking annoying GUYS LISTEN TO MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! GUYS!? GUYS!!! hasbeen"
That said, if you were willing to think outside the box, this could be construed as a (mental) disability (which would be covered)
From the FBI website;
Although the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990 (amended in 1994 and 1996) defines a hate crime as a crime against a person or property motivated by bias toward race, religion, ethnicity/national origin, disability, or sexual orientation, the FBI does not have any federal jurisdiction to investigate hate crimes motivated by a sexual orientation bias. The FBI's authority to investigate hate crimes motivated by a disability bias is generally limited to incidents interfering with the victim's housing rights.
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No. NTFS is neither patented, nor dangerous to use.
The history. All started about 5 years ago. The old NTFS driver was written for NT4 NTFS but Windows 2000 introduced some improvements. The changes were important enough not to work with the NT4 driver. Unfortunately the driver didn't check the NTFS version, developers vanished thus it thrashed quite many people's filesystem. Unfortunately nobody cared to fix it for a long time.
Here comes Merkey to the picture. He generously offered people a Linux utility, free of charge that had Windows fix NTFS itself (aka run fsck during boot). Unfortunately he had an NDA with Microsoft, not to reveal internals of NTFS. According to him, Microsoft threatened him with a suit. Microsoft claims that it never threatened him or his company with a suit. More about the issue here.
The story got Slashdot attention but with some twists: Microsoft Litigation vs. Linux NTFS Kernel Support. The minor problem was, that the Linux support for NTFS had nothing to do with Jeff Merkey or his company. Still, the Linux community thought they were directly threatened by Microsoft.
Conclusion? Linux NTFS development slowed down a lot. Red Hat has removed NTFS support completely and after 4 years, they still refer to non-existent NTFS patents, even if they would be void due to laws, e.g. the project is for the purpose of writing interoperable software under Sect. 1201 (f) Reverse Engineering exception of the DMCA.
And why NTFS isn't dangerous? Write support was disabled about 3-4 years ago and a new driver was written from scratch for 2.6 kernels that doesn't implement write, except file overwriting.