Microsoft FAT Licensing Plan - No Big Deal?

prostoalex writes "InternetNews.com describes the reaction to Microsoft's decision on FAT licensing. It doesn't look like the company is expecting to make any significant money out of licenses (there's also a cap of $250K, so none of the big guys will have to pay millions to Microsoft). It also doesn't look like Linux companies are stressed over this decision. "We are only accessing FAT32 file systems, not using them. This licensing program is of little interest to SuSE", a Novell/SuSE spokesperson said."

Comments

This isn't about patents...

[cperciva]

This isn't about making money, and it isn't about protecting a patent. This is simply an exercise for the benefit of the courts: Microsoft will be holding FAT (along with lots of other things) up as examples of how they're making their standards available to the competition.

Microsoft licensing program

[metalpet]

I suspect Microsoft current trend of licensing every protocol and file format they possibly can is not a small thing.
IANAL, yet I have the sneaky feeling the terms of those licenses preclude GPL products from using protocols or file formats covered by them, *even those licensed for free*.

As to whether or not those licenses are necessary is a great question. Do you really need a license to read an XML file? According to microsoft, you "may", since "Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.".

Worry.

Lets clear away some myths and FUD

[rebelcool]

For those of you too lazy or of poor reading comprehension skills...

FAT is an old time file system created in the days of DOS. Its very simple, requiring little overhead in computation and space. Modern file systems are much more efficient at large media sizes, but for your floppies, flash cards and other small portable media, FAT works really, really well since you don't need a beefy device processor to handle it, and its simple enough to create the software to work with it that any competant OS programmer could write a FAT wrapper.

Microsoft is NOT charging for FAT itself. Most people for the past 20 years have reverse engineered FAT because it is very simple. It is widespread, virtually every widely used OS supports it. They're not trying to squeeze money from any of these people.

What they are charging for is their own implementation of FAT. Since they did in fact create the standard, presumably a microsoft licensed FAT implementation will be entirely compatible with FAT since they give you the code and official specs to base your system around. This is what they are charging for. Nothing else.

Now for those who are going to ask "but why would someone pay when you can find those reverse engineered specs easily...". Well, thats a business decision. Do you trust those specs enough? Or "just to be safe" do you want to pay microsoft for their guaranteed implementation?

And thats all this is about. Really, honestly, a non-issue.

Re:Lets clear away some myths and FUD

[NanoGator]

"And thats all this is about. Really, honestly, a non-issue."

Yeah.. well. still, I'm sharpening my pitchfork anyway.

Reverse engineered specs not necessary

[jizmonkey]

Appendix C (pages 6 through 18) of the DOS 1.1 manual gave bit-level instructions on how to write and read FAT. Obviously, this was just FAT12 instead of FAT16 or FAT32, but it's never been the case that you needed to "reverse engineer" FAT to write an implementation. The specs have always been freely available.

I agree with your statement that the canonical implementation has some value, though.