From: Daniel Phillips <news-innominate.list.linux.kernel@innominate.de> Subject: Tux2 - evil patents sighted Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 03:07:47 +0200 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Thomas Graichen forwarded me some interesting information from the freebsd-fsdevel list regarding 3 patents held by Network Appliance, Inc., Santa Clara, CA that seem to describe much of the mechanism that underlies Tux2. I haven't heard anything from any representative of Network Appliance, which I find very curious because they must certainly have heard of Tux2 by now. But of course when I do hear from them they will want something, and I will want them to FOAD. http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05819292__ http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05963962__ http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/details?&pn=US06038570__ It is important that all technology used in GPL software be free of patent restrictions. Unfortunately for Network Appliances, I developed all the essential concepts they describe in 1989 (the RAID optimization excepted, see below for what I think about that) and implemented them in a production system. In other words, I've got prior art; their patents are worthless. Furthermore, I developed the entire Tux2 design and implemented most of it before I ever even heard of their software, much less their patents. And on top of that, other people also have prior art (check out Auragen, if you don't know what it is, ask Victor Yodaiken). OK, I sense there's going to be a fight, because Network Appliance is a profit-making corporation and they would be remiss if they didn't try to defend their IP. Did I mention that software patents are evil? Did I mention that software patents make people behave in evil ways? I'm not going to change my course at all, I'm determined to bring this better idea to Linux in a free and open way. I will continue to develop it until it's finished. Oh, and the phase tree algorithm is fundamentally superiour to their WAFL algorithm, as I will demonstrate next week in Atlanta. I invite anyone who's interested to email me and help out. Are you a patent lawyer that likes to work for free? *Especially you*, please email me. Now let me state my position on patents: - Patents are evil - Software patents are especially evil - Patents, and especially software patents, constitute nothing less than government-sponsored theft of property that properly belongs to humanity. - If we did not have any form of patent, humanity would be better off. - If we did not have any form of patent, the world economy would benefit. Yes, that means corporations too. - If we did not have any form of patent, *most voters would benefit* <-- pay close attention to this one - Patents are anti-capitalist: they interfere with the proper functioning of the market economy. Patents on business methods are already rearing their ugly head. - It's getting worse. If the current trend continues, you will soon see the life of patents being extended, you will see patents being granted in areas that were previously considered off-limits, and you will see countries outside the U.S. being pressured into supporting the patent system in various ways. - We can't change the world overnight, but we do already possess the power, if we excercise it, to send the laws that gave birth to software patents back into the cesspool they crawled out of. - In spite of the popular myth about the lone inventor who strikes it rich, the only real beneficiaries of patents are corporations. Yes, a few lone inventors strike it rich, but not enough to undo the damage done to humanity in general. Most lone inventors just get ripped off by people who prey on them and their dreams. - If all patents were to vanish today and never come back research in general would accelerate, not slow down. Linux is proof of that. - Lawyers built the patent system. Tim O'Rielly once asked a patent lawyer how he would feel if other lawyers could patent legal arguments and charge him money to use those arguments in court. Though he tried to twist out of answering that one, eventually he had to admit that he had no answer. This lawyer IIRC is the director of the U.S. Trade and Patent office. OK, I'll stop ranting now. I knew it was going to happen, and not only that, this is going to happen more and more until the evil patent system is uprooted and composted. Now, the specifc discussion: US patent 5,819,292 "Method for maintaining consistent states of a file system and for creating user-accessible read-only copies of a file system"; ApplDate 1993-06-03 <- Four years after I did my work. "A method is disclosed for maintaining consistent states of a file system. The file system progresses from one self-consistent state to another self-consistent state. The set of self-consistent blocks on disk that is rooted by a root inode is referred to as a consistency point. The root inode is stored in a file system information structure. To implement consistency points, new data is written to unallocated blocks on disk. A new consistency point occurs when the file system information structure is updated by writing a new root inode into it. Thus, as long as the root inode is not updated, the state of the file system represented on disk does not change." *** I did all of this in my database program, which in fact implemented a complete filesystem on top of the existing filesystem. This was 1989. "The method also creates snapshots that are user-accessible read-only copies of the file system. A snapshot uses no disk space when it is initially created. It is designed so that many different snapshots can be created for the same file system. Unlike prior art file systems that create a done by duplicating an entire inode file and all indirect blocks, the method of the present invention duplicates only the inode that describes the inode file. A multi-bit free-block map file is used to prevent data referenced by snapshots from being overwritten on disk." *** They come close to winning one here, but their multibit free map loses it for them. I do it with a single bit, and I should patent the way I do that (GPL of course). Even better, I recently figured out how to make the Tux2 snapshots *read/write*, and even *exchange* and *rotate* snapshots. Take that you evil intellectual property barons. patent 5,963,962 "Write anywhere file-system layout"; "The present invention provides a method for keeping a file system in a consistent state and for creating read-only copies of a file system. Changes to the file system are tightly controlled. The file system progresses from one self-consistent state to another self-consistent state. The set of self-consistent blocks on disk that is rooted by the root inode is referred to as a consistency point. To implement consistency points, new data is written to unallocated blocks on disk. A new consistency point occurs when the fsinfo block is updated by writing a new root inode for the inode file into it. Thus, as long as the root inode is not updated, the state of the file system represented on disk does not change." *** Again, I did every last bit of this in 1989. "The present invention also creates snapshots that are read-only copies of the file system. A snapshot uses no disk space when it is initially created. It is designed so that many different snapshots can be created for the same file system. Unlike prior art file systems that create a clone by duplicating the entire inode file and all of the indirect blocks, the present invention duplicates only the inode that describes the inode file. A multi-bit free-block map file is used to prevent data from being overwritten on disk. " *** Same thing again. They lose. US patent 6,038,570 "Method for allocating files in a file system integrated with a RAID disk sub-system" (which isn't a patent on WAFL by itself, it's a patent on the way we try to arrange to write as many blocks in a stripe as possible). *** Well, I'd have to call this one particularly obvious. In any event, if they want to argue I think they'll find themselves in a position of having to kiss their main patents bye-bye. -- Daniel - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/