“…Merkey acknowledged that his company had been “providing
some assistance to Linux guys on NTFS,” but said that at no point
did Timpanogas or its officials provide to open-source developers
any of Microsoft’s intellectual property.”
“Our agreement with Microsoft was very broad. We wrote some
conversion tools for converting NetWare and Linux file systems to
NTFS,” Merkey explained. “We were giving these tools to some
Microsoft customers who were using NTFS on Linux, but who were
having their hard drives trashed by it.”
“Merkey claimed he was providing a service to Microsoft
customers who needed to run NTFS across platforms, but that
Microsoft had a different interpretation of his motives.“
“Microsoft’s view is to hell with Linux and anything that helps
Linux,” Merkey said.”