Filesystems and licenses

[Civillian]

Hello everybody.
I was wondering, would there be legal problems to adding NTFS and ExtX support to a kernel released under a custom MIT-like license?

[linguofreak]

IANAL, but I believe that as long as you don't use any code licensed under an incompatible license to implement either filesystem, you should be fine. If you plan on writing all of the code yourself (rather than reusing code from another project), it's hard to see how you could run into any trouble at all. (I suppose there could be patent issues with NTFS, and I wouldn't put it beyond Microsoft to sue someone who implemented NTFS, even if they didn't technically have a leg to stand on, but the fact that they haven't sued over NTFS support in Linux makes me think it's almost certainly something you wouldn't have to worry about).

[Love4Boobies]

Given that Linux has a NTFS driver, you probably shouldn't worry about patents. And even if there were patents, Microsoft wouldn't care about your little OS---even if they found out, it's too insignificant for them to care. ReactOS (an open source Windows clone), which gets a huge deal of attention, breaks dozens of patents and rules (e.g., some of the developers looked at the NT code released by Microsoft to university students and other code that leaked from Windows 2000 and are still on the team; others don't do proper clean room engineering, they just look at Microsoft's disassembly and then reimplement certain components, etc.) Microsoft didn't do anything about it, although they have made it clear they know about the project.