Microsoft prohibits GPLed work via licensing of CIFS standards

[Joerg Schilling]

>From: Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com>

>I think, but don't quote me ;), that we're actually only talking about
>one patent here - 5,437,013. 5,265,261 appears to be an earlier version,
>and at first sight Microsoft appear to have narrowed their claim from
>the previous version. There is also supposed to be an even earlier
>original claim, which has now been completely disclaimed - if anyone can
>find it, it would be interesting (I don't think the UKPTO passed it?).

>What the patent appears to be is a claim on raw-mode network access,
>along the lines of libpcap or something - an efficient way of
>marshalling streams of data from applications and the network stack to
>the wire so that it actually makes sense. I would be astonished if there
>was no good prior art on this; the claim is from ~1993. Even if there is
>no prior art, I can't believe that it's even vaguely original.

RAW network access has been implemented by Sun in 1986 with:

-	Reverse ARP Boot Protocol daemon

-	Etherfind (a precursor of Snoop) ... the programs where the ideas
	have been copied as "tcpdump"

Jörg

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