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Microsoft to Charge for FAT File System

Posted by michael on from the ext3 dept.

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."

1 of 1,424 comments (clear)

  1. Re: the future? by MuParadigm · · Score: 2, Redundant

    (Reposting from above because it's particularly relevant to this thread)

    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:

    http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/download/hardw are/fatgen103.pdf


    (e) Each of the license and the covenant not to sue described above shall not extend to your use of any portion of the [FAT 32/VFAT] Specification for any purpose other than (a) to create portions of an operating system (i) only as necessary to adapt such operating system so that it can directly interact with a firmware implementation of the Extensible Firmware Initiative Specification v. 1.0 ("EFI Specificaation"); (ii) only as necessaary to emulate an implementation of the EFI Specification; and (b) to create firmware, applications, utilities, and/or drivers that will be used and/or licensed for only the following purposes: (i) to install, repair, and maintain hardware, firmware, and portions of operating system software which are utilized in the boot process; (ii) to provide to an operating system software runtime services that specified in the EFI Specification; (iii) to diagnose and correct failures in the hardware, firmware, or operating system software; (iv) to query for identification of a computer system (whether by serial numbers, asset tags, user or otherwise); (v) to perform inventory of a computer system; and (vi) to manufacture, install and setup any hardware, firmware or operating system software.

    It doesn't seem like they could actually sue anyone for using FAT under this covenant, which is copyrighted 2000