FTL patent.

[David Woodhouse]

dhinds at zen.stanford.edu said:
>  I've recently learned that there is a fairly annoying encumberance
> associated with FTL: while it is now part of the PCMCIA standard, it
> is patented and M-Systems grants a royalty free license for its use
> *only* for PCMCIA devices.  So technically, it appears that any use of
> FTL for non-PCMCIA devices is a patent infringement.

> The patent claims are broad enough that I don't see any straighforward
> way of writing a free non-FTL translation layer.  But I'm not a patent
> lawyer, and don't really know what can and can't be gotten away with. 


alex at signum.se said:
>  Note that there *might* be patent problems using this code in the US.

Is this _just_ a US problem, or are the patents applicable world-wide?

Could we get away with inserting a check so that the FTL code is only allowed to 
be used with PCMCIA devices, (which can conveniently be disabled with a 
single-line patch)



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