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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."
When 95% of your target market wants reliable plug and play compatability with Windows you don't introduce any unecessary complications.
but apparantly this is only for the media, not the hardware that reads it. so this is not FAT software, but the act of pre-formatting media to the FAT format that is patented, or at least that is being enforced.
I presume its an attempt to kill FAT, maybe because MS found some hideous flaw in it they do not want responsibility for. Or maybe simply because they plan to make it easy to migrate to other windows file systems as opposed to Linux which I would expect to the the direction embedded devices would be heading nowadays.(linux)
I'm certain any manufacturer of embedded products could use FAT32 for embedded drive formats, but use some kind of reverse-engineering crap in the DMCA to prohibit you from knowing it's FAT32.
/.ers are trying to claim they will use it for.
I really wish you people would stop pretending that the DMCA is some magical wand that allows coporations to do whatever they want. There's no way anybody could use the DMCA to shield them in a situation like that; it's laughable. The purpose of the DMCA is for situations like Adobe's ebook, where if someone cracks the encryption they'd get free ebooks. In that situation the DMCA is a Good Thing. Coporations can't use the DMCA to cover up illegal activity or to stifle competition (garage door remote, Lexmark ink cartridge), or a dozen other things that
Aw crap, ninjas!