Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Charge for FAT File System
pario writes "According to Microsoft, the Redmond company is going to charge a license fee for any product that is formatted in FAT by the manufacturer. Any manufacturer of compact flash memory cards or digital cameras may end up paying Microsoft as much as $250,000 for the use of the file format. The FAT File System is covered by several US patents."
Gotta love submarine patents.
Is there a win32 ext2/3 filesystem driver out there anywhere?
What if you just sell the cards and usb sticks unformatted and have it formatted under windows? That way you could evade this kind extortion?
Hm...since Apple's Disk Utility will let you format pretty much any writable media in FAT, will Apple have to pay Microsoft for that privilege? Will they choose to do so, or will they drop the ability?
Note to manufacturers: this will make your Mac formatted media actually cheaper to produce, so even if you don't give the consumer a discount, that's just one more reason to continue to produce Mac-compatible product...
--
$tar -xvf
All four listed patents deal with the problem of having both short and long file names. None of my digital cameras use long file names.
The earliest versions of the FAT file systems were around in 1981. (Actually probably 1979 or 1980 if you count Seattle Computer's QDOS). Those patents must've expired by now, right? Or does Microsoft get a perpetual patents the same way Disney gets perpetual copyrights?
Does this mean the Linux kernel will be dropping FAT support? And BSD for that matter?
http://ext2.yeah.net
Can they enforce their patents in Europe ? What will be the consequence for Euro-based device manufacturers ?
Maybe we deserve this world ?
And if they can stop a manufacturer from delivering a product such as a USB drive pre-formatted with FAT, then can't they do the same with a pre-formatted floppy disk? For that matter, can't they do the same with a floppy disk that contains software? Anyone who sells PC software on floppies will owe Microsoft money! (There are less today than there were just five years ago, thanks to CD's, but there are still many small businesses out there. I just got a driver on a floppy last week with something I bought).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This one isn't really submarine --- They created FAT in 1976, according to the microsoft.com page ... but the earliest patent was filed in 1995.
That can't possibly be right. In the US (but nowhere else) you have a 1 year's grace period from the time of publishing an invention such that you are still allowed to patent it. Even with the USPTO's track record (!!) I honestly can't see them granting a patent based just on 1976 technology. MS must have included new ideas... or something like that.
The four patents cited all relate to Microsoft's kludge for shoehorning long file names into a filesystem that can only take 8+3 names. You know, Microsoft -> Micros~1.
First I'm going to get obligatory whinges out of the way. It's ludicrous that this is patentable. The patent is stupidly long and verbose, probably to make this 'innovation' seem more significant than it actually is. The patent is also worded to sound as though this is a useful general idea, rather than something that you'll only ever see in FAT because everyone else is sane enough to just use a better filesystem.
On a more practical note, these patents cover only the long name -> 8.3 stuff. Those digital cameras that write 8.3 names (DSC00001.JPG, DSC00002.JPG, ...) should be fine. Shipping blank but FAT-formatted media should also fall clear of the patent's grasp - the patents don't cover the FAT filesystem itself, just the 'VFAT' Win9x method of fitting long filenames into FAT. Furthermore, the patents seem to cover algorithms for inserting long filenames into the directory tables - implementations that don't write, but only read data, might be okay.
Simple blank FAT, might I add, has been around for at least 17 years, so any patents on it should have expired by now.
Ob-disclaimer: I've only skimmed the patents, and I'm not a lawyer. I'm probably wrong.
OK, so we format it in ISO 9660 and the drivers are written to treat it like a CD-RW. Microsoft just makes companies move to standards. (Or they ship it unformatted, and the users choose how to format it according to their OS of choice.) Put the driver on the device (small ISO 9660 file system) set to auto install, and you're set.
Talk about submarine patents. Floppies have been shipping FAT for *decades*!
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
The four patents listed appear to be to do with VFAT, and specifially the way it simultaneously has a short (8.3) and a long name for each file.
The earliest patent was granted in 1996 - what then of the Rock Ridge CD format which offers a somewhat similar mechanism for long Unix filenames over the standard short ISO9660 length, and was adopted in 1994?
Sure, you could have it use another FS (ext2) but can you imagine a DOS not using FAT?
here's the fist of the patentes in question. Filed for only in 1995, granted in 1996. I've looked at it, but I don't have a good understanding of how claims in a patent work. If each claim represents something they own then I don't see any way they can makes claims as broad as claim 1. If the patent is only for something that matches each and every claim, then it would seem that a very minor (even compatable) varient on one part of any these claims would allow an alternate file system to co-exist that would not infringe the m$ patents. But then it doesn't make much sense for this (or any) patent to go into extreme detail in making claims that would limit what the patent applies to.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Disclaimer: I've worked with the FAT12, FAT16 filesystems in assembly language.
FAT is relatively well documented. IIRC, one can already format a FAT filesystem from Linux, and even if they can't, writing the drivers wouldn't take long.
But why would you use FAT in the first place? It's a very inefficient filesystem, built for ancient hardware.
Since static memory sticks have no problems with random access, it doesn't make sense to use traditional filesystems which were designed to minimize seek latency involving mechanical components. In fact, due to the block access factor, most filesystems are very inefficient when it comes to data storage.
One would think that instead of using a filesystem per se, the memory of a memory stick should be managed in a fashion similar to malloc. The difference would be named allocation - a "filename" would be associated with every section of memory allocated.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
There's always: http://sys.xiloo.com/
Which seems a bit improved on the very useful expore2fs.
I want NATIVE file system integration, VFS is NOT DEEP ENOUGH.
http://sys.xiloo.com/
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
GINF is a filessytem structurally similar to FAT and just by coincidence happens to be compatible, but is not FAT. Would some crazy idea like this work to dodge a patent? If you have a clean implementation of the filesystem that differs in specs from another fs are they really the same? I think it would really only be FAT if you use the microsoft driver. If you don't use the MS driver it must not be true FAT. LAME seems to use this idea; everyone knows LAME Aint an MP3 Encoder, it just so happens that by pure coincidence the files it outputs are compatible in an mp3 decoder.
Dear Sirs:
I'm a computer professional. On rare occasions I still used floppy disks that I have formatted and put business product on. I might distribute two or three a year to business contacts this way. It has come to my attention that Microsoft now wishes to enforce it's patents on the FAT file system and I believe that the floppies that I distribute might fall under this extension of you monopoly power. Therefore I would like to request that you provide me with the proper paperwork and licensing agreements so that I can pay my 25 cents each time I do distribute a FAT formatted floppy with my product on it.
If we can take down web sites, perhaps the Microsoft legal department should receive a few million requests from people who want to be sure they don't cheat bill out of his two bits when they format and distribute a floppy.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Furthermore, any other drive formatted with NTFS that I wanted to access, like a USB or Firewire hard drive, would be similarly difficult with a Linux machine.
I had a computer at work die recently. The motherboard popped a chips as it turns out. The problem was that it messed up the hard drive (NTFS) in the process. I couldn't get the drive to mount on any other NT machines so I tried running a Linux distro from CD. It mounted the drive without problem and was able to read most of the contents (some of it was still gone but I was able to recover my work from that day at least). So in this case Linux was better at handling NTFS than Win2K was.
Except, the linked webpage clearly states:
"Microsoft's FAT file system license offers limited rights to issued and pending Microsoft patents on FAT file system technology, as well as rights to implement the Microsoft FAT file system specification."
It appears that Microsoft is selling a liscense to implement their filesystem. However, the liscense is for manufacturers of consumer electronics and removable media. It's unclear, based on my lack of knowledge of this legal area and the ambiguity of this document, whether (e.g.) writers of software targeting non-consumer electronics products (such as personal computers) would need to approach Microsoft for liscensing.
However, the patents all have to do with VFAT long filenames. Thus, it appears that a manufacturer may only have to refuse to deal with anything other than valid 8.3 filenames to avoid the patent liscensing hassle. I don't know how Microsoft could claim to enforce a restriction on implementing anything on FAT that's not patented; I don't believe they can, under US law, but like I said, I have a very incomplete understanding of US law in this respect.
While these formats might work out OK, they certainly aren't optimized for small hard drives the way that fat is. More importantly, perhaps, Windows can't read them without extra drivers, so one could easily argue this is just Microsoft taking advantage of their monopoly status: have an OS that only reads file systems patented by themselves. How convenient.
Yes, but how hard is it to implement a windows DLL which allows reading ext2 (for example)? At http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs. htm there is such a program. Have whatever program/DLL included with the digital device install program. End of problem and paying M$ royalties. After all, ext2 is fully documented and (to the best of my knowledge) patent free.
And for those who will claim, "But that is an extra step!": Yes, but the drivers only need be installed once, and the ability to save about $250,000 per license term (a year maybe???) will be hard to resist for manufacturers. I've seen manufacturers skimp on things which cost a lot less.
The Microsoft article pointed to by the story claimed that the first version of the FAT file system appeared in 1976. Any 1976 patent has, as you say, expired.
But the FAT design was such a half-assed pile of crap that it became obsolete very quickly, and Microsoft patched it up several times. Presumably, they patented the fixes.
It is difficult to understand how even the notoriously permissive US Patent Office could grant a patent to something as far behind the state of the art as the FAT file system. Its only original features were steps backwards from the state of the art. Not only the Unix filesystem, but several proprietary minicomputer filesystems which have since died, were significantly better than the FAT filesystem.
Patents require disclosure of everything necessary for a skilled person to recreate the invention.
But, NTFS uses several inventions, and some code to tie them all together. Whereas you should be able to determine all the patentable bits, it may be REALLY tough to figure out all the details.
I read the Sorenson video codec patents once, to see how they encode video. It was a nearly useless endeavor.
I don't think so. Programs that use the FAT filesystem have been out there for several coon's ages or the age of a really old coon.
FreeDOS does not distribute in the FAT filesystem, interestingly: the official distribution is a CD-ROM ISO image only. They also don't distribute product or media preformatted with FAT. I don't even think Microsoft is going after programs that can create a FAT filesystem, so FreeDOS can format a hard disk and you're good to go.
However, I wouldn't mind if they did make it ext2. If you're booting with FreeDOS, it doesn't really matter what the filesystem is. Just allow reading of FAT partitions and floppies, and you can copy over all the old DOS software you wanted to run. Might be a few bugs here and there, but I guess when Microsoft wants to play rough, you just get out of the way.
...
Just discovered this link in a comment over at Groklaw. Section 1.e. of this document would seem to indicate that MS has already granted the right to use FAT for hardware and operating systems:
It doesn't seem like they could actually sue anyone for using FAT under this covenant, which is copyrighted 2000.
Of course, just as Microsoft may have assumed, manufacturers could either use FAT and pay up, or sell their media unformatted, in which case the customer needs a M$(-licensed) product to format it to FAT.
However manufacturers will probably want to test an initial write/read cycle, but if (for the sake of quality control) they simply format their media to something else (let's call it FOSFS, the hypothetical Free and Open Source File System
If this has been Microsoft's reasoning, they have neglected to consider another possibility:
On current removable media of 256 megs and up, an entire Linux distribution takes up less than 10% of capacity:
Unless the boot process from USB memory requires more than a rudimentary, non-infringing "allusion to FAT", such media could not just be formatted in an empty FOSFS, but it might rather be sold with preinstalled software such as this (compiled without FAT support of course): Cameras etc. could switch to the new FOSFS immediately, for PCs would not need to support it "out of the box", as the removable media itself would actually "be its own driver" (and media viewer, and provide network connectivity, etc.).
In this case, such "not-so-blank media" should certainly bear the penguin logo as a "seal of quality".
To justify adding a Creative Commons mark next to it, one could even fill the remaining space with some free and open (motion) pictures and/or audio to be played on first use.
Microsoft itself would have to catch up and release Windows support for the FOSFS before everyone sends and serves pictures from some sort of "USB Linux".
If only one major manufacturer of removable memory takes an approach like this, at M$ the employee who came up with that "bright idea" of a FAT license but failed to see this option may have a hard time explaining...