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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."
Litigation: The Business Model of the Future!(TM)
(Disclaimer: The above statement is the intellectual property of Uberm00 Corp. and may not be used without prior written permission.)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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?
The end of FAT as a file system..
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Failure to litigate...
heh...
no seriously, FAT was convenient and fairly standard.. all microsoft is going to do is drive manufacturers to other (hopefully free software) schemes.... That's when we all win! THANKS MICROSOFT!
Whats going on here, they cant want more money, are they just trying to kill FAT and push NTFS or what?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
If they charge people, then they have to support it.
I'll bring them my broken SD-card directories so that they fix their bugs.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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
How is Microsoft going to know what format the device is in without breaking the DMCA?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
I see nothing wrong with it. They own the patents, so they have the right to sell it to whoever pays. BTW, slashdot post is a bit misleading.
"Pricing for this license is US$0.25 per unit with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per licensee."
The $250K is the cap; that means, that is the maximum amount they will charger per license holder for the use of the FAT. Just thought it came across incorrectly.
A blog like any other.
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 point why I think such a scheme is totally fucked and dishonest is not the fact that such patents exist, but because of the following business model:
1. Create valuable idea
2. Wait until it's a defacto standard 3. PROFIT !!! (no ??? required)It looks more and more like RMS is a true visionary.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This will probably make MS a little money, until the embedded industry moves en masse to a free file format. If they do, the file formats for PDA's et al move away from MS's (FAT) standard - something that mas long-term repercussions for MS.
The profit margin isn't that great on PDA's et al as it is - why would the industry want to cede a further chunk of that margin to MS? All you'd have to do is include a driver for a free file format with the PDA cradle, card reader, and/or desktop application.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
All manufacturers will grumble (some louder than others), pay up the money and then add an additional $5-$10 on their products to compensate for this licence.
I'm wondering though, if they supplied the products unformatted, would that still mean they have to pay the licence? Upon insertion, Windows would helpfully offer to format the drive for you and then you'd be ready to go.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Thickheadedness helps the process of moving away entrenched companies. And this case is no different. MS is still very much entrenched, no doubt about that. But hardware manufacturers are now that much more likely to support other standards and filesystems (like ext3) natively, and perhaps as their primary system.
They'll get away with this because they're big enough. And they'll make some money. But this, and similar practices, will work against them in the long run.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The first FAT file system was developed by Microsoft in 1976. That system was based on the BASIC programming language and allowed programs and data to be stored on a floppy disk. Since that time, the FAT file system has been improved upon multiple times to take advantage of advances in computer technology, and to further refine and enrich the FAT file system itself.
Today, the FAT File system has become the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers, and, since the advent of inexpensive, removable flash memory, also between digital devices. The FAT file system is now supported by a wide variety of operating systems running on all sizes of computers, from servers to personal digital assistants. In addition, many digital devices such as still and video cameras, audio recorders, video game systems, scanners, and printers make use of FAT file system technology.
Microsoft is offering to license its FAT file system specification and associated intellectual property. With this license, other companies have the opportunity to standardize the FAT file system implementation in their products, and to improve file system compatibility across a range of computing and consumer electronics devices.
Nice guys. Create a standard, realize its being used for a lot of devices after 27 years, see the chance for even more money you don't need, and then charge for it.
It's not worth 250k for a license. We had to use it in devices to remain compatible with an OS that was forced upon us.
Give me a break.
They have several patents. They are charging for their intellectual property. If your beef is fundamentally with the patent system, that's fine, but don't take it out on Microsoft. They are a company which has a legal obligation to their shareholders, and they are doing something well within the law to achieve that.
Remember that this isn't someone just trying to cash in specifically on FAT, this is one part of a program to expand their licensing available. Many companies are probably quite happy about this - shifting from usage of FAT being shakey legal ground to solid legal ground & a known factor.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
I must be missing something here....
How can they enforce this, if memory cards/sticks for cameras have been doing this for years now? If they haven't be pursuing the patents enfringement before this, can they now?
What about pre-formatted floppies?
I thought Digital Research was the company that had developed the FAT system?
Is it unreasonable to think that the logical next step is for MS to demand payments from any and all developers of software written to run on the Windows platform? Can a Windows application run without needing to access or use any patented Windows code?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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?
how many people does this really affect?
It isn't used on home computers only, it is also used in digital cameras and compact flash memory cards, who this is going to affect more. These have have much smaller disk spaces (currently, at least). So, it is going to affect more people than you think.
aterr - an open source threaded discussion board.
http://ext2.yeah.net
Perhaps now we'll see manufacturers adding [ext2/3/your favorite flavour of a fs] to their products.
Esp with camera's gaining support for the picture tranfer protocol (PTP), they are becomming more and more filesystem agnostic. Other devices may as well...
the pun is mightier than the sword
Can they enforce their patents in Europe ? What will be the consequence for Euro-based device manufacturers ?
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Where do you get your information? That number is inaccurate:
NTFS, FAT, FAT32
A blog like any other.
It's not like Microsoft even invented the format...
Eric S. Raymond predicted that Microsoft would force the patent issue on its file formats in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
This is very worrying. Let's hope MS didn't get this idea from there.
While I support ESR, I can't help but wonder if outlining Linux's strengths provides M$ with a plan of attack on Linux.
I do not believe this is a big surprise move by MS. They are, after all, the devil :-)
But seriously, I have wondered for a long time how long RedHat and other companies would get away wiht providing tools that help people transition to Linux. Such as the tools that mount ntfs or fat filesystems. Microsoft knows nothing of the spirit of cooperation as proven by the way they treat their business "partners." Instead of working together to achieve something great as in a partnership, Microsoft waits til they think its profittable and normally competes head to head with their partners by buying out one of their competitors.
Now, in the same fashon, they will charge for something that was free. Compnaies are hooked into using the FAT filesystem. And, like a drug dealer, they start charging for the drugs that keeps the user flying high now that they are hooked by the first freebies.
Intelligent companies will figure a way to not be exploited by MS. Of course, if they were intelligent, they should have seen this coming from MS.
Thanks to royalties on the .GIF format after years of being royalty free, the .JPEG REALLY, and I mean REALLY took off, plus PNG came about as well. Lots of programs dropped .GIf support completely and I didn't blame them. Maybe this will make another standard take precedence on new camera's and flash devices, $250k is a HUGE price to pay for a little startup trying to push a new product
They didn't file any till 1995. Kinda clever, really - don't even bother patenting it untill you see if it's going to be popular. All the benefits of the submarine patent, but without the up front patent fee!
Today, the FAT File system has become the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers.
...
...
Microsoft is offering to license its FAT file system specification and associated intellectual property. With this license, other companies have the opportunity to standardize the FAT file system implementation in their products.
If you are interested in obtaining a license, please contact...
(my emphasis added)
You know, they don't have any of the usual SCO-style 'people are using our property without paying us' gripe. I think they're just selling the right to use their specification, not insisting that everybody pays up or get sued.
Well not yet anyway...
foo mane padme hum
Is there a win32 ext2/3 filesystem driver out there anywhere?
Forget that -- there is FAT code in the Linux kernel. More IP that smacks Linux and means that it cannot be distributed (and interoperate with windows, as FAT-based systems were the only major filesystem that both Linux and Windows can read and write out-of-box. Very bad juju.
FWIW, it is *damned* hard to write Windows filesystem drivers -- compare a small Linux filesystem -- RAMFS, at 342 lines of source -- with even a minimal Windows driver. There is an ext2 implementation with read support, though.
Oh, yes. The embedded community uses FAT all over the place. They are going to absolutely go bonkers when this hits the news.
May we never see th
I wonder what this means for Linux/BSD FAT drivers. Microsoft's current licensing scheme seems to apply only to companies that sell pre-formatted storage devices/media with FAT, but surely this has implications for free software.
Hey, if they can't compete on quality and features, why not force their way into the market using patents.
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.
RTFA. (Go ahead, give me the old "You must be new here" - joke. :)
:)
The linked article does not mention home computers. Microsoft wants license fees from:
1) Manufacturers of solid state removeable memory devices
and
2) Manufacturers of certain types of consumer electronics that use the FAT file system:
portable digital still cameras
portable digital video cameras
portable digital still/video cameras
portable digital audio players
portable digital video players
portable digital audio/video players
multifunction printers
electronic photo frames
electronic musical instruments
standard televisions
Do you think you'll ever buy one of those? Then it'll affect you.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
It's a good business decision, sure. But see, MSFT is a convicted monopoly. Their business decisions are supposed to be limited to those things which don't stifle competition. However, since our government is owned by corporations, and the people who are supposed to be enforcing this are ignorant of technology, the monopoly rating has no meaning. That's what we bash.
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.
Because it's harder and harder to innovate with respect to hardware, and provide backward compatibility with your existing client base.
.
What's more, each new 'major' release of (Windows at least) doesn't really provide much in the way of 'must-have' capabilities for enterprise customers, who are the bread & butter for companies like microsoft. Adoption of software upgrades since Win2000 have been slow in the market, because . .
Computers and gear tend to work 'well-enough' for most business uses - so sales of new gear has stagnated for several years (though there are signs of a turnaround).
And Free offerings are becoming more and more viable alternatives for forward-thinking organizations.
So Microsoft is really in a bind here - declining sales, difficulty in setting the technological standards that used to grant them monopoly pricing power, and increasingly viable alternatives for customers leave them forced to consider revenue streams such as licensing technology. And to try like hell (witness their latest DRM efforts and attempts to make it a standard that would guarantee them sales and licensing revenues) to use whatever vestiges of their monopoly power to twist a few more years of control out of their franchise.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.ht ml
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
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
It seems to me that Microsoft is granting licenses for their FAT code and what-not. They make no mention of not being able to make your own FAT-system (which what everyone has been doing up 'till now).
The only reason you'd really care about this is if you run a large company that makes FAT devices and want to insure that your FAT-system is 100% compatible with specs (which are controlled by Microsoft). Otherwise, you wouldn't care... You'd just look up the well published info already available for free on the 'net.
/dev/random
That brings forward an interesting detail: filesystems for flash-memory devices should be optimized to avoid writing often to the same memory area (the FAT for example) because the memory position may fail after a few thousand writes to the same position, or is this taken care at the memory controller level and the filesystem need not to care?
...
It may be the case that one FS is more or less adequate for flash devices given this restriction holds true
It's like charging users of MS Word a license fee per document.
You're jumping too far ahead. They don't plan on doing that until Q3 2006.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
Does this apply if you develop your own FAT-formatting software?
Or does it just apply if you sell media that is formatted with FAT?
I'm guessing here, but I expect that if you sell your media unformatted, you'll be OK of course, but what MS is trying to do is prevent anyone from selling MEDIA that is FAT-formatted, but they can't stop you from using something like let's say FreeDOS or Linux to format the media once you've bought it?
Is that right?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Anybody has the right to file a patent and attempt to license its technology (as long as the patent makes sense, which is not always the case with software patents, but that's another story).
The right way to do it: get the patent, announce the technology and licensing terms for it, sell licenses to however's interested. This way, manufacturers can decide whether they want to invest into that particular technology or find an alternative.
The wrong way to do it: get the patent, wait for a large number of manufacturers to widely use the technology, then announce licensing terms. This way, manufacturers have already invested a lot of resources into the tech and have no choice but to pay for the license, because switching to an alternative would cost them even more.
In an ideal world, the wrong way should be illegal and carry criminal sentences for extortion.
It's not an issue that a clean-room implementation would fix. The patent in question isn't on the code, but rather on the file format. Remember all the shit that Compuserve put people through over the GIF file format? This would be similar. Microsoft is saying "Hey! We should be making money off that!". I don't know what this means for FreeDOS, PC-DOS, syslinux-based boot disks etc, but it can't be good...
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Umm no its because the patents don't cover FAT16, only FAT32 which WAS developed between 90-95 for Windows 95
Do these devices really need compatibility with "dead" operating systems?
The second patent seems to another concerning filename formats. I haven't bothered to look at the other 2.
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?
That doesn't mean they won't go there, just that they haven't yet. Still, the typical knee-jerk reactions here are as yet unwarrented.
It's very good move by MS.
/. -- when you're done writing around 200k files to flash media it was already past erasure limit for those sectors at the beginning i.e. media was destroyed.
FAT is a terrible format for Flash media, because it constantly updates some variables in first several sectors of the disk. The effect was mentioned some time ago on
So it might actually give some incentive for vendors to move to JFFS or similar FS _designed_ with this flash-specific limitation in mind.
rrw
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
It's not like they provide very much information, but here are the patent abstracts, plus links to the full patents. They sure don't seem interesting, and they all seem to deal with the coexistence of long and short filenames. All of this wouldn't be patentable in Europe.
United States Patent 5,579,517
Reynolds , et al. November 26, 1996
Common name space for long and short filenames
Abstract
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.
United States Patent 5,745,902
Miller , et al. April 28, 1998
Method and system for accessing a file using file names having different file name formats
Abstract
A multiple file name referencing system stores multiple file names in a file. These multiple file names include an operating system formatted file name and an application formatted file name. When an operating system formatted file name is created or renamed, the multiple file name referencing system automatically generates an application formatted file name having a potentially different format from, but preserving the extension of, the operating system formatted name. The multiple file name referencing system similarly generates an operating system formatted name upon creation or renaming of an application formatted name. A B-tree is provided which contains an operating system entry for the operating system formatted name and an application entry for the application formatted name, each entry containing the address of the same file to which both names refer. The multiple file name referencing system converts the operating system formatted file name to the application formatted file name by accessing the B-tree with reference to the operating system entry, and vice versa. As a result, either file name can be used to directly reference the file without requiring additional file name translation.
United States Patent 5,758,352
Reynolds , et al. May 26, 1998
Common name space for long and short filenames
Abstract
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.
United States Patent 6,286,013
Sure, you could have it use another FS (ext2) but can you imagine a DOS not using FAT?
As long as they don't use both long and short filenames in their implementation, they won't violate those patents. At least that's what the abstracts make me believe. See my other post, where I put the abstracts.
WinFS is a layer on top of NTFS. WinFS does NOT replace NTFS as the lowest layer on the disk. Why should they create a totally new filesystem when NTFS is quite good at what it does?
NTFS supports many features that go unused >90% of the time, such as multiple file streams. WinFS will more fully use features present in NTFS as part of its operation.
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.
It's dishonest and unacceptable for them to attempt
to start charging after so many years, for something
noone has ever charged for before, after it has
become something which has become a de facto standard,
often implemented in hardware. Like GIFs were, their
patent should be ignored, and more ideally, legally
shot down.
Was FAT really innovative anyway? The patents just
cover modern issues probably not even implemented
on 95% of the FAT-handling devices (e.g. my
digital camera). From what I remember of CP/M's
filesystem, FAT didn't seem to be markedly
different.
On another node, as IBM and Microsoft had
cross-licensing for most of their early
DOS-related stuff (remember PC-DOS?), should
their claim not be invalidated, could they simply
grant the world an open license for it?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"... volumes bigger than 2gb..."
This should be file sizes bigger than 2 Gigabytes.
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
This is certainly not true. With copyright law, it's illegal to copy code. With patent law, ideas are patented. Wheter it's implemented in a 'clean room' or not, that really doesn't matter.
THAT's the reason why we detest software patents in the first place!
To be able to bring out preformatted FAT flash devices without paying the Microsoft license, one would have to claim rights to 'prior art'.
In contrary with copyright law, however, it's the responsability of the IP holder to come down on the infridger (so as long as you don't get a letter from MS, you aren't obligated to take action).
Yet IANAL but in my past businesses talked about these issues alot with lawyers.
Regarding the question wrt European manufacturers usage of the FAT filesystem. First needs to be seen if these patents are also valid in Europe or not. After initial issuing a patent in Europe, US or Japan it's automatically valid for 3 years in all of these regions. After this period it needs to be registered in the specific region. As I presume these are quiet old patents, one should look into this.
However, there still is controversy regarding software patents and its enforcebility in Europe. European software patents should also have a hardware part. This license has a hardware part, but the patents themselves not. ;-)
You might want to consult a patent lawyer to verify this, but I would bet that it's unenforceable in Europe. However, I wouldn't bet on this for 250k USD
A lot of smaller device vendors will probably sell the unformatted version after they receive letters from MS (which is a pity as FAT is readable/writable by Win/Mac/Linux).
A lot of users will now unknowingly format their cards using NTFS making it harder to exchange data with non-Windows users...
Regarding the FAT driver in Linux; as this MS license only speaks of preformatting digital media in the FAT filesystem, this is not an issue today.
Could Microsoft ask money for inclusion of the FAT driver in the Linux kernel?
Remember, patents are about ideas, not about the actual implementation or even in which language certain algoritms are written (it's about what is accomplished, not about how it's actually done). So as the FAT filesystem is patented technology, they could theoretically take action.
However, the action needs to be taken by them first. If 'prior art' can prove that the Linux implementation is based upon technology very simular than the patents issued, a case in court might prove the patents to be not really valid.
Such a thing would also destroy all possible revenues from licensing programs such as these (it's higly unlikely that device manufacturers will try to prove they had access to prior art, the long-bearded fs developers in the OpenSource community are probably less easy to convince - especially since the patents where only filed in 1995).
If the outcome of a legal case would be different, chances are higher that distributions would just drop the filesystem driver instead of paying money to Microsoft.
So, to me it seems that Microsoft would have more to loose than to gain from going after the FAT driver in Linux.
copyright.
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.
These patents, as has been mentioned before, cover only long file names.
Based on my cursory reading of the patents:
A device that merely formats a storage device so it can be used by an infringing writing device would not by itself infringe these patents.
Similarly, if a camera (for instance) does not contain logic capable of writing long file names it would also not infringe these patents.
Microsoft probably set the maximum at $250,000 because it would cost more than that for a company to litigate the issue.
I recall that Novell's Netware 3.x had the ability to use multiple namespaces, and would automatically produce truncated versions from long file names for DOS machines. Used to run a Novell server that had Mac, Unix and DOS/Windows clients.
Do they own enough patents to shut that project down? If they make sure we lose both FAT and SMB, I'm afraid that will do a lot of damage to Linux. Both dual-boot and fileserver Linux will disappear.
I bet they are particularily interested in pushing aside Samba, since that would automatically mean more 2003 licenses.
Stop the brainwash
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.
Yes, but what if they cloned it BEFORE it was patented?
Supposedly, MS patented FAT in '96, so if someone had cloned it before that, wouldn't that be OK?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Bdoh! JFS is open source... Available at your closest ftp.xx.kernel.org mirror in recent linux-kernels, and possibly in *BSD too (at least I've got a vague recollection of someone doing a port). And to preempt a possible question, yes, it's IBM's own code, not reverse engineering.
So are MS enforcing the patent on the crappy FAT16 - some cheek there! - or the improved FAT32?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
"Microsoft needs to defend this patent lest they lose it."
You're confusing Trademark law with Patent law; Trademarks must be defended lest they be abandoned, patents can be enforced against some, all, or none of those infringing on the patent at the patent-holder's whim. The entire practice of "defensive patents" rests on this.
U.S. Patent #5,579,517 Common name space for long and short filenames
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.
U.S. Patent #5,745,902 Method and system for accessing a file using file names having different file name formats
A multiple file name referencing system stores multiple file names in a file. These multiple file names include an operating system formatted file name and an application formatted file name. When an operating system formatted file name is created or renamed, the multiple file name referencing system automatically generates an application formatted file name having a potentially different format from, but preserving the extension of, the operating system formatted name. The multiple file name referencing system similarly generates an operating system formatted name upon creation or renaming of an application formatted name. A B-tree is provided which contains an operating system entry for the operating system formatted name and an application entry for the application formatted name, each entry containing the address of the same file to which both names refer. The multiple file name referencing system converts the operating system formatted file name to the application formatted file name by accessing the B-tree with reference to the operating system entry, and vice versa. As a result, either file name can be used to directly reference the file without requiring additional file name translation.
U.S. Patent #5,758,352 Common name space for long and short filenames
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.
U.S. Patent #6,286,013 Method and system for providing a common name space for long and short file names in an operating system
An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The GIF file format isn't patented. You can't have a patent on file formats, the order of fields in a sector, etc. There is nothing innovative in that.
... instead of following the compression algorithm.
The hardware process of the LZW compression algorithm was what as patented. You can write GIF files without using compression (literal, clear dictionary, literal, clear dictionary
Here, Microsoft's patents relate to algorithms for fitting long filenames onto a file system that only supports short filenames. They do NOT have a patent on the (V)FAT filing system. However, in working with those filing systems you may need to use algorithms which Microsoft managed to patent.
Does my bum look big in this?
Static, EEPROM (flash) and all other memory chips allready have a built-in filesystem. RAM means random access and voltages on the pins select the exact points on the chip. FAT is used because just about every OS supports it and cheap card readers can be made.
Using no filesystem will get the best usage of the memory chips. Please note that a 1440k floppy won't give you that but perhaps 10% less. As usual M$ shoots itself in the foot and camera makers can advertise 10% more pictures to a card. Tar would work nicely as a 'filesystem' and as far as I know that is free and even Windows understands it. Tar is very efficient but not exactly 'random access' something not usually needed in a camera.
No filesystem or minimal formatting works well on all removable media. That includes DVDs and CDs which will hold considerably more if you don't use cd9660 or UDF. If you have Unix (and SCSI) try it if media is intended to be streamed. Any further discussion of this is offtopic.
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.
Let me remind you, this is the kind of B.S. that can happen when you rely on proprietary software (I'm guessing that FreeDOS and friends do rely on MS standards in order to maintain compatibility with MS-DOS programs). Someone can pull the rug right out from under you whenever they want to.
So MS is going to nickle and dime people to death. Who would have guessed...
FAT is much older than 1981. FAT (File Allocation Table) file system was originally written by Bill Gates for Microsoft's Disk BASIC for the Altair back in 1975.
CP/M used a totally different file system. QDOS is also much later than FAT.
The patents being discussed are not for FAT itself but for the additions to FAT that were done for Windows 95.
The patents aren't for FAT, they're for enhancements to FAT (like Long File Name support) that were added in the 1990s.
The original 12-bit FAT format patents are probably expired by now but IANAL.
The Dakota Disposable Digital uses the FAT12 file system internally (just like all smart-media products), but this isn't really noticible though its interface to the outside world. The only externally visibile part is the directory entry, of which they don't use all the fields. The FAT table & directories (it does use 2 directories internally) is totally hidden from the interface.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The Microsoft patents cover only their specific implementation of how to map long file names to short file names. Some of the earlier patents they reference are:
If you looked up Microsoft's patent and wrote code based on it, then you could infringe. If you looked at Winders and tried to do long and short filenames the same way it does, then you could infringe.
Having your MP3 player use FAT and just long file names doesn't infringe, if I'm on the jury.
sigs, as if you care.
My guess is Microsoft is trying to generate some buzz same as SCO.
Here, Microsoft's patents relate to algorithms for fitting long filenames onto a file system that only supports short filenames.
Innn-teresting...
Do the Rock Ridge extensions for ISO 9660 count as prior art?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
#5,579,517
#5,745,902
#5,758,352
#6,286,013
(For Those too Lazy to read The Article)
The Geek in Black
I know my BCD's (when I'm Sober)
My first and best guess would be trough their assess. No more, no less.
Never forget that this is the company that have claimed wonderfull things like 'a web browser is part of the system kernal' and that 'a media player is inseperable from a operating system'.
Any thing coming out of that company should be taken with a truckiload of salt.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
"Personally I think MS is simply trying to quicken the demise of FAT so they can drop it quicker. About time, too -- there's simply no need for it anymore."
I respectfully disagree. OSX, OS9, Linux, BSD, and almost any other OS that you can think of can read and write FAT. Any device that is to be cross-platform compatible with read/write works very well with FAT. The only other filesystem that I know of that these all read and write is ISO9660, which last time I checked didn't include long filename support without Microsoft Joliet extensions or some other after-spec hack anyway.
Microsoft isn't going to support a filesystem that makes it easier to use devices on a competitor's platform, plain and simple. OS implementers have had to reverse engineer Microsoft's ways of doing things for a long time, and if Microsoft is allowed to litigate FAT out of use, they'll use it to try to force everyone else out.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The problem with it is, their implementation of long filenames for FAT was in the hands of people outside of Microsoft well before the one-year prior drop-dead date for the application. Before it was Windows 95, it was codenamed Chicago and it was available to ISV's beginning of 1994 (as in it was available to developers outside of the company BEFORE April 24 1994...) - I know, I was part of that beta program. It does not matter WHAT you have with those people in the way of non-disclosure, they're customers and the moment you put an improvement in the hands of anyone outside of your company, the clock on the filing date starts ticking because you've revealed it to the world as far as the law is concerned.
The first patent, at least, is invalid by their OWN prior art.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
When you look at the bigger picture, it sure doesn't look like there's any growth left in the company. For me, the telling signs were:
1) first put up when Microsoft started mentioning the word "Linux". They don't do that normally since it validates the product.
2) when they started mentioning it in their financial statements.
3) when LAMP took away most of the MS Windows server growth.
4) more and more mentioning of the word "Linux" by Bill and Steve.
5) recently when Prudentials financial analysts start asking about Microsoft Windows growth prospects against Linux and Linux desktop growth.
6) Microsoft trying to pedal it's patents for $$$.
It may not be visible as a death spiral but it sure looks like there is a massive amount of "concern" in Redmond. And with all of their profits in the OS and office applications, they have nothing but cash to help them get out of this. Even giving away their software will not KILL Linux. It would only slow it down momentarily and they know this. IMHO.
There is concern in Redmond. You can be sure of that. Is the Coriolis Effect in action here? There's probably some movement already and there is no sign of an opposing force. Surely, not this patent claim.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The Prior Art for the first, third, and forth patents may be found in the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol standard for UNIX, which was an IEEE draft specification as far back as July 13th, 1993 according to this PDF file. The first patent is definitely covered by this.
Now, the second patent, the very specific one about tracking name changes and automatically generating the short-form name and about storing all this info in a B-tree predates the RRIP by about a year. This is one of the nicer features of the extended FAT filesystem -- the part that automatically downgrades "My Lovely File.doc" into "MYLOVE~1.doc" and provides a fast lookup method for it. This may be the bulletproof patent for them. Though the IEEE group definitely was meeting before 1993, we can't be sure that they had discussed implementation-level details of using RRIP as a rewriteable format where files can be renamed. I couldn't find any discussion of using B-trees in the filesystem in a brief skimming of the RRIP draft.
Also, in rereading the third and fourth patents, I realize that they're talking about your ability to either reference your document by either the long or the short file name at the same time. I can't remember if RRIP allows you to use the ISO 9660 8.3 filenames or not. This too may be solid.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Responsding to myself, but this just occurred to me: I wonder how this will affect the FreeDOS project. My first guess would be that they'll have to rewrite the project to use ext2 or some other file system.
Software patents have been commonly regarded as the "nukes" of the software world. I'm beginning to think that MS has decided it has nothing to lose by going nuclear on the free software world.
Mac's HFS and HFS+ are another alternative. There's PC (pay) software to read them already in at least 3 flavors, and I believe Linux supports them, too. Of course, these may be covered by Apple patents.
Of course, this might explain why it's such a bitch to format to FAT on a OS X Mac....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Does anybody know why de Icaza likes to follow what Microsoft is doing? When I first heard of Gnome from one of its devleopers, he described it as a Microsoft COM-like design. When I asked why they would follow Microsofts design philosiphy he had no answer. THEN, de Icaza pulls out the Microsoft dotNet-like thing. And there are patents on that stuff too.
;-)
I just really looks like de Icaza has a "thing" for copying Microsoft's designs. And if THIS current patent issue isn't a sign of things to come, I don't know what is. Novell might get nailed with patent claims against Gnome and it's other recently purchased copies of Microsofts work. They'll still have Suse though.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
With the whole Master & Slave controversy going on, it should not be long before the FAT system get banned. Or at least renamed "No really your butt does not look big in those pants file system"
Actually, you are alittle off. QDOS was developed by Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products. He developed this in his "spare time". QDOS was called "Quick and Dirty Operating System", of which he modeled off CP/M, the popular operating system at the time. He had essentially "reveresed engineered" CP/M, using the CP/M manual as his "specs" for his OS, QDOS.
When IBM tried to buy the rights to use CP/M from Digital Research Inc (DRI), Gary Kildall wasn't available, and his wife and lawyers did not like the non disclosure agreement presented by IBM. So DRI sent IBM packing.
IBM then went back to Microsoft since it was Microsoft who sent IBM to DRI. At the time, IBM had only contracted Microsoft to do the languages and some tools for the IBM PC. IBM needed an OS to run on the PC. Microsoft then "seized" the opportunity and told IBM that they would supply an OS for the system. As "luck" would have it, someone at Microsoft knew about Tim Patterson's QDOS and they pursued it. Microsoft then bought QDOS for $50K from Tim Patterson and Seattle Computer Products. This was the "deal" of a lifetime, since from there DOS royalties jump started the Microsoft engine.
For more info, check History of DOS (PC Museum), one of many sources of information on the subject. Or check Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary series.
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
Hard drives aren't what Microsoft is after. They're after things like USB keychains, Compact Flash cards, etc. There are a lot more of those sold than there are external HD's, and they come pre-formatted to work in digital cameras.
;-)
Could be "over a barrel" syndrome because you have lots of devices like digital cameras that can read FAT and nothing else. I doubt many average joes have the ability to flash their camera BIOS to get them to read reiserfs or xfs
A Patent, in and of itself, doesn't care about those things. So, in actuality, Microsoft could ask for royalties on each and every Patent on this list and legitmately so unless each are invalidated or your implementation is somehow found to not infringe.
Let's go over the Patents one by one, shall we?
5,579,517 - Common name space for long and short filenames. Filed for on April 24, 1995. This one only impacts you if you're using a Common Name Space for long and short filenames. Basically, the scheme they deployed for Chicago- references a preferred embodiment for MS-Dos 5.0 that was apparently handed to the USPTO as part of the application. Very much likely to be invalidated, though, by their OWN prior art release of Chicago to the world in December of 1993. This describes a scheme for handling long and short filenames correctly. If it's not invalidated, you might run afoul of it trying to do a VFAT type implementation.
5,745,902 - Method and system for accessing a file using file names having different file name formats. Filed for on July 6, 1992. Reading the abstract of this one, you'd have to allow renaming of just the name and preserving the extention for the purposes of keeping track of the filetype. Abstract explicitly mentions the use of a B-tree (Limits the scope of what they're claiming- you can possibly sidestep things by using red-black, AVL, etc...). They don't appear to have troubled this application with a possible prior art release, but unless you're doing the exact same thing for handling renames, etc. I don't think you're impacted by this one.
5,758,352 - Common name space for long and short filenames. Filed on September 5, 1996. A cursory reading of the Patent filing made by Microsoft leads one to believe that this is a re-application of the 5,579,517 Patent. While I'm not an IP lawyer, they appear to be claiming the same basic things in both documents. If this, in fact, the case, the 5,579,517 Patent's invalidation would likely invalidate this one. You would probably run afoul of this Patent if you attempted to implement a VFAT style filesystem.
6,286,013 - Method and system for providing a common name space for long and short file names in an operating system. Filed on January 28, 1997. This one is an EXPLICIT Patent-style description of how Windows 95/98/Me handles long filenames on an x86-32 platform. Cute. The applicablity of this Patent to anything other than an exact clone of Windows 95/98/Me is doubtful at best. They explicitly mention things like BIOS interrupts and x86 register names in their claims. Better yet, the preferred implementation was deployed to the World at large in Windows 95- TWO YEARS PRIOR to the filing date.
You should consult a Patent attorney before making any decisions regarding this request for royalties from Microsoft. However, having said this, I'd feel fairly comfortable about the situation overall based on the observations made above.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
BZZZT!!! Wrong! yourself.
FAT was written by BillG for Microsoft Disk BASIC for the MITS Altair in 1975-6. SCP's QDOS didn't exist for another 5 years and when rewritten (yes, rewritten) as PC-DOS in 1981 used Gates' FAT file system.
While flash is random access and doesn't have a physical seek latency, it is indeed a block device. On reads this isn't evident, but on writes it is. You can only overwrite whole blocks at a time. This is why it actually does make some sense to use traditional file systems on flash devices.
The enemies of Democracy are
This is not a huge money maker for Microsoft, this is a strategic move on a couple of fronts.
1. To all those who say the announcement only covers hardware -- you're all wet. This might mean similar claims may be made against software strategies and not knowing is worse than a claim.
2. Linux attack may only be an added bonus for Microsoft in this measure. They might be preparing to build a case for database driven file storage. The SQL server vision they've been talking about. I'm not debating its workability.
Microsoft likes to control the market rather than compete in it. The licensing issue is a new stick or carrot. When they want to push people off FAT drives they can raise this license price.
3. Linux should take this seriously, where it is affected -- I dont know enough to answer that.
Open source should continue appealing to the government for a right to interroperate according to simple, sustainable rules. The government is responsible for protecting consumer choice and fair market -- Microsoft's history shows it cannot be reasonable in this matter.
The Intellectual Property basis for the available file systems should be catalogued. If there is a clear best choice it should be made known.
SCP's QDOS was written in Feb/March 1980 and released as 86-DOS in late 1980. While the idea of using a FAT was based on BillG's Disk Basic, the specific implementation of FAT-12 was Tim Patterson's work while at SCP. Also recall that 86-DOS was written in such a way that it was very easy to port CP/M programs - i.e. similar data structures for the file control blocks.
PC-DOS 1.0 was a re-warmed 86-DOS 1.14
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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.
>So now that you'll either not "have a positive experience or put[s] a
>lot of pressure on [y]our support systems" trying to install a digital
>camera or flash media under Windows, do you think that Microsoft will
>have to drop their desktop distribution?
This fear of "negative experience" will cause the camera vendor to bend over and pay the license fee, because they (rightly) fear their customers are not capable of installing extra drivers.
Thank you for your excellent reading. This should definitely be modded up. However, I'd like to add a couple of comments.
First, by your reading, it seems that only VFAT is affected. This is bad, but not as bad as it could be.
Second, some other people have posted that the license applies only to embedded devices. This has nothing to do with the infringing or noninfringing nature of Linux. All this means is that the only group Microsoft has offered to license to *legally* use long filenames on FAT is the embedded folks. This means that there is currently no option (if indeed the VFAT kernel module infringes, as it appears to do) for Linux folks to have uninfringing use. There is no requirement for Microsoft to provide such a licensing option, and they may sue for damages regardless of whether or not they provide such an option.
Third, my reading is that your argument about the patents being invalid due to prior art is incorrect. The relevant section is USC 35, Part II, Chapter 10, Section 205. The relevant clauses are (a) and (b). (a) does not apply because it only relates to prior art as produced by others. (b) does not apply because it refers to *public* use or sale -- not a couple of MSDN members or whoever got to play with Chicago betas. Windows 95 was released in August, 1995. This is less than a year before the patent application in April, 1996.
May we never see th
Of course this is stupid, bad, mean, blah blah blah. You guys have already covered that. What's interesting to me though is that Microsoft needs device makers to make devices that favor (or atleast are compatible with) windows. iPOD (used to) prefer Macs, and so someone in love with iPods would probably prefer a mac. If Microsoft discourages manufacturers from making devices compatible with windows, they will end up hurting their popularity (duh.)
no comment
The computer I'm typing this comment on is a Mac, which dual-boots Mac OS X (native filesystems: HFS+, UFS) and Linux (native filesystems: ext[23], XFS, ReiserFS). Neither OS had stable read/write support for the other's filesystems at the time I installed, but everything can write VFAT, so I allocated a 20GB VFAT (FAT32) filesystem (~/Storage in Linux, /Volumes/STORAGE in MacOS) for bulk file storage that should be shared between OSs.
/home and ~/Storage onto HFS+, if I can work out how to keep UIDs in sync between the two OSs.)
...), although in this case VFAT has the additional advantage that it's the "second-best" filesystem for NT anyway.
(Linux supposedly now has reliable read/write HFS+ support, but I haven't tried it yet; if it is indeed reliable, I might migrate
The same solution would be useful on a dual-boot WinNT/Linux PC (NTFS vs
(In fact, my PC still dual-boots Win98/Linux, so NTFS isn't an option for me anyway - I might consider upgrading to whatever the latest version is when a lot of software starts to require NT, or I might just run Linux and MacOS exclusively.)
That was the intent, and I suspect to some extent it still works that way. But I suspect that there's far more happening of a different sort with patents - and that's the creation of a club. Remember the phrase, "stand on the shoulders of giants?" Well, the shoulders are patented. If you want to stand on those shoulders and reach higher, you have to let the giant reach that high, too.
In essence, patents have created a club, and while you can still get a patent and make money, you probably can't disrupt an existing technology, because you need to license existing technology to make your patent work, and the most likely license term is to cross-license your technology back to the would-be disruptees. They can either take advantage of the technology, or you'll find that the license prevents you from disrupting their business - unless you're excessively lucky.
I recently heard about a guy with some sort of chemical/drug/food (forget which) patent that's running out. NONE of the industry has agreed to license it, they're just waiting for it to expire. In the meantime he's losing all of his development and attempted marketing money. Maybe he was asking absurd terms, maybe he deserved them, but the industry felt we could get along without the new product, the guy couldn't commercialize without more money than he had, so they could afford to wait.
Come to think of it, I've got a friend in the very same situation.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Kind of a moot point. The patents MS lists in the notice are related to FAT 32, which is easily the most widely used implemetation of FAT now. FAT 16 only supports up to 2GB, whereas FAT 32 supports 32GB. Anyone who sets up a FAT partition on a dual-boot system as a common file storage area will be using FAT 32.
Those patents were granted in the mid-90's, and short of invalidating them via prior art claims, they won't expire for another ten years or so.
Sadly, that simply isn't true. Trademarks work that way, but patents do not.
Unisys successfully pulled off just such a stunt with LZW compression as used in GIF files.
this is. MS is using their monopoly unfairly, patent protection or no. This should be fought on those grounds and should win. Anyone with big enough pockets to do so?
That's not an NT file-system driver, it's just a program that can read files and looks like Explorer. A proper driver is an NT IFS (installable file-system) driver, like this one.
The FAT file system format was never patentable to begin with, since there was nothing particularly novel about it when it was created. What's more, it has been in use for more than 20 years (the lifetime of a patent) and nothing about it was patented within a year of its implementation and release to the public. So, Microsoft has no rights here. Its claims to the contrary are absurd.
Well, well.
Personally, it looks to me like MS is trying to capitalize on these patents now, after many years of not enforcing them.
Are patents like copyright? In copyright law, if you don't enforce your copyright (a.k.a. 'a xerox machine',) you lose the copyright. Something can just 'fall' into the public domain if the copyright holder doesn't actively protect their copyright.
Can patents go into the public domain the same way? MS hasn't truly enforced this patent, ever. Floppy disks, hard drives, MP3 players, flash media, etc, have all come with FAT formatting pre-applied as long as you've been able to buy them. (I know I had 5.25" floppies that came pre-formatted in FAT back in the mid-'80s.) Because they never chose to enforce their patents before, can these patents just be declared void?
To me, this looks like MS trying to force everyone to NTFS, to lock out other OSes. (For example, if my new digital camera uses NTFS on its flash memory, my Mac will have problems with it.) As far as I can tell, MS still isn't licensing NTFS, though. It wouldn't surprise me to see another licensing announcement soon, licensing NTFS either at no cost, or for less than FAT.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Au contre. You can have a patent on that stuff and Microsoft has at least one of them. It's been several years since I read about it. But M$ has a patent on on older version of a Media Player file format.
A shareware software author figured out the format of the sound file and added into his sound file edit/conveter software. M$ found out about it ,and they sent him a C&D letter. He removed support for that patented Media Player format even though he was in the right. He didn't have the money to fight it out in court.
Clean-room procedures can avoid patents if the result in something that creates the same or compatible output without doing the things specified in the patent.
Clean room is still meaningless in that case. If you can figure out a way to do something equivalent without infringing the patent, it makes no difference if you've already read the patent or not.
If you then sell that product and get sued for patent infringement, the court will only be interested in whether or not your version infringes the patent- they don't care if you knew about the patent before you built it. Clean-room procedures will only make your re-invention work slower and more expensive. ("Oops, sorry. That idea violates the patent too! I won't tell you how, though. Just get back in that closet and try again!")
However, this is easily avoided. If you use MS Windows to create an image,
If you paid for that Windows, then you're hardly avoiding a dependency on Microsoft.
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.
While Microsoft's patents on something as broken and trivial as FAT are silly, they are presumably valid. The more serious problem here isn't Microsoft, it's other companies that didn't do their homework before choosing a Microsoft "standard". Maybe once it costs them significant amounts of money, they'll start paying more attention. But $250k may not be enough.
And there are a few open alternatives that even Windows understands out of the box: ISO9660 and UDF come to mind (although Windows may not apply them to flash devices by default).
Because although installing a filesystem driver may be painful on Win98, it's one thousand times worse on solid-state electronics.
I disagree. I write firmware for digital cameras and I'm in the process of switching from SanDisk's old twist on Etc Bin Systems' RTFS to their newer twist on it that supports FAT32. The hardest part of the job is that I've decided to revise how our "imports" system works and shift build configuration from shell variables to makefile variables (for mapping platforms to collections of features).
Actually porting the code is pretty dang easy- a POSIX-like open/close/read/write API at the top adn a bdevsw-like block(s) read/write, device init/info/reset API at the bottom.
The hard part is 1) getting everyone to agree on a patent-unencumbered filesystem (though standards bodies & extensible standards for this already exist: DCF/DPOF/EXIF/PMA/etc.) 2) getting everyone to implement it
If we switch from the Mass Storage USB class to the Still Image Device Class (PTP (picture transfer protocol) over USB) then the media format will only matter when you take the card out of the camera & use a media reader.
Canon is already making this transition which is why you can "share" their cameras with Mac OS X 10.3 & take pictures by USB control.
As the camera ASICS speed up, the desire to remove the media to read out pictures will decrease. Right now, my Dazzele Hi-Speed USB 2.0 card reader kills our cameras, but that obstacle can be overcome.
I'd be willing to buy a digital camera that's just a little less convenient in order to take this and rub it in Billy's face.
Admirable. And non-representative of the typical consumer's response.
PS. Slashdot had better not allow editing of posts. That's inimical to a threaded message system. You can't have a coherent discussion if the comment you were replying to can be totally redone, leaving a response floating after it that now seems irrelevant.
If editing is allowed, it should always leave an option to see the earlier version(s)... and if someone responds to the pre-editing version of the post, then that version should be the default one displayed (With a small link going to the new version).
The first thing Slashdot should do to modernize its comment system is to create an official way to quote the preceding message, instead of relying users to manually paste it and insert italic tags.
Let's go back through the Patents again with that tidbit in mind...
My statement still stands on the 6,286,013 Patent- it's not applicable execpt in the narrowest of terms, i.e. sitting on top of a BIOS/BDOS interrupt driven disk access, x86-32 system. It's just a wee-bit too specific to be something they can ask for royalties on for most things out there. (Even though they've got the brass balls to try all the same...)
The 5,745,902 Patent discusses the process that they use for the LFN->8.3 and 8.3->LFN correlations and keeping it all consistent within the OS. Referring to the Patent text:
One wouldn't get tripped up on this part by simply NOT using a B-tree since they don't allude to any other indexing scheme. They do, unfortunately go on to describe in detail the 8.3 name generation scheme (Otherwise known as name mangling...) and their methodology for avoiding conflicts...
However, based on how the whole scheme works (which isn't covered by this Patent...), it's concievable to come up with a different naming algorithm that would work that didn't touch on their algorithm. If that's possible, then you don't get tripped up on that Patent as it is an explicit statement of how MS does the task- if you can come up with an alternate method that does the same thing (or close enough that Microsoft's code doesn't notice that you're not doing it "right"...), you're in the clear on that part of the Patent. I suspect that this is the case, based on my studies on the VFAT scheme.
Now, the real sticking point is the other two. They discuss handling long and short filenames in a common database. The real question is, is it a common database? If it's not, the Patents, while lovely in and of themselves, would not cover the exact situation or a portion thereof, thereby allowing you to avoid issues with them.
So, one would want to answer that question to determine if things look bad for people wanting to implement VFAT systems (We'll get to possible Prior Art issues in a bit...). In order to do that, one would have to do a rough analysis of VFAT to see how it's done up.
Referring to a developer's notes on VFAT (http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/gchunt/vfat.html), we can see that Microsoft has hacked in a scheme to wedge the LFN into the current directory structure entries, 13 characters of the LFN at a time. Therefore, without prior art involved or
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Stick a USB pen drive into a Windows XP machine and it loads the drivers and gives it a drive letter.
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...
Oh? My fully-functional 83GB FAT32 partition makes me seriously doubt that.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Source Code is BSD-licensed, it does not have the filesystem size limits that FAT does (which flash card manufacturers will be nearing, sooner rather than later) or the file size limits. It has always had support for long filenames. You do NOT need to ever defragment it (much better than even Ext2/3 in that regard). It is incredibly stable, and does not loose data in any cases (unlike Ext2). It is also very high performance (unlike just about any other filesystem).
Just about every modern OS supports it:
FreeBSD
OpenBSD
NetBSD
Linux
Mac OS (v.X and up)
Tru64/Digital Unix
AIX
HP/UX
Solaris/SunOS
And many more I can't think of off the top of my head. So why doesn't one company put a little effort into writing a Windows filesystem driver (Open Source it and they won't even have to maintain it) and then reaping the rewards of finally having a universal filesystem for their storage devices?
If it wasn't for filesystem incompatibilities, removable hard drives would be a major, major threat to optical media like CD/DVD-Recordables.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Meanwhile from the consumer's point of view, the difference between a $50.00 drive and a $50.50 drive is 1%. If consumers were strongly motivated by 1% price differences, we'd see stores advertising 1% off sales.
A use of the Invention outside of the Inventor or his Employer constitutes an offer for sale or gift thereof, regardless of the disclosure conditions the party recieving the gift or sale since they are not parties to the Company by way of the agreement (These agreements are SPECIFIC about this sort of thing, by the way...).
It's kind of moot anyway. The Patent in question was a continuation (something I missed- it's why you're supposed to consult a Patent attorney, BTW...) and therefore had a prior art start date of April 24, 1993. However, the Rock Ridge RRIP specification for the ISO-9660 filesystem describes a largely identical (by the reading of Microsoft's actual Patent claims- this one's nicely broad) scheme that implements short (i.e. 8.3) filenames in the same database as long filenames (i.e. POSIX 256 character names...) for the purposes of transparently supporting long filenames on systems that would and providing the regluar means for accessing the short ones on systems that don't understand the extentions. While it remains to be determined that this is, in fact, Prior Art, it's likely to be so and it was initially published by the Rock Ridge group in 1991, some 1-2 years prior to the filing by Microsoft on all of that.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas