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Microsoft FAT Patent Upheld
theodp writes "After initially rejecting Microsoft's File Allocation Table (FAT) patents, the USPTO has ruled them valid. From the article: 'Microsoft has won a debate where they were the only party allowed to speak, in that the patent re-examination process bars the public from rebutting arguments made by Microsoft, said unimpressed Public Patent Foundation President Dan Ravicher.'"
What does that mean to companies that sell stuff like USB flash drives or CF cards? They'll obviously have to pay royalties, of course, and that means a mass migration to a new filesystem to avoid such payments.
But what new FS will that be? FAT32? EXT2/3?
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
that just reminds me of the clown court from transformers the movie
And why would they want to keep the patent on that again, for other reasons than just appearing "evil"?
Guess it's time for that diet.
How will this affect the ability to read FAT filesystems under Linux?
A patent on FAT doesn't really have much of a use for them now; at least none that I can think of. Just let the filesystem become an open standard now, MS.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
They finally patented Steve Ballmer.
Better get to the gym!
A patent on FAT doesn't really have much of a use for them now; at least none that I can think of. Just let the filesystem become an open standard now, MS.
USB HID Mass Storage devices apparently usually use FAT.
Now, granted, I don't know whether they implement long filename support (which is what Microsoft's patent is on, IIRC), but FAT is still very relevant in the embedded device world, even if desktop boxes are now using NTFS instead of FAT.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Even though microsoft has a huge patent portfolio, this won't make a bit of difference for anyone. Microsoft doesn't generally enforce the patents it does have. I believe they keep them more as a protection against other companies.
Does anyone know of any major lawsuit where microsoft actually tried to have a patent upheld?
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
According to this link: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp , three of the patents (U.S. Patent #5,579,517, U.S. Patent #5,758,352 and U.S. Patent #6,286,013) all cover the "Common Name Space for short and long filenames."
What other parts of the FAT filesystem are protected by patents? This aspect of the FAT filesystem is just darn near obsolete as there aren't many systems that absolutely have to have the 8.3 format anymore are there?
Now, I have to admit, this is something that seems fairly specific to Microsoft's needs and is not a feature I've seen in any other filesystem. However, it also seems that this might be fairly easily just...excluded...without causing any really serious issues.
I am probably oversimplifying things.
In the months since the last ruling, MS obviously got to someone (can you say bribes?)
I mean now they aren't even letting people comment on it? So no one else can show that MS is wrong and that there's prior art.
"Microsoft has won a debate where they were the only party allowed to speak, in that the patent re-examination process bars the public from rebutting arguments made by Microsoft,"
FAT is such a technical piece of crap that I would have thought nobody would want to patent it, out of pure
embarrassment.
For non-technical people who don't grok filesystems, there's a good story about FAT here: CyberSnare.
If they prohibit vfat maybe xfs or reiser4 should be ported to Windows for better access on a dual boot setup.
They can just charge you $0.25 more. Most consumers arn't going to notice the quarter and are going to notice the formatting.
paintball
will be interesting to see if they just tuck it into their already fat (sorry) patent portfolio or actually try to collect on it. i doubt the later will be the case, as FAT so old and is already used everywhere by everyone. i don't even see much use as a pre-emptive patent. i can't see anyone suing anyone for using it.
1) Is there a USB mp3 player that can be formatted and still be usable with some type of Linux file system? I need to buy one anyway so why not go with a model that doesn't require FAT/FAT32
2) I may be wrong but I don't think SuSE 10, which is what I use, comes with the ability to employ a FAT type file system. When I setup my system I don't recall seeing FAT as a choice for the file system format when I was slicing up my disk partitioins. If that is indeed the case, how could this patent be a "threat to Linux which can't be distributed with any patented technologies"?
what about software that can create a FAT file system? Do those entities who distribute such software have to pay? How about users who format a drive, are they required now?
I'm under no obligation to use FAT on my USB sticks. They come with a FAT filing table, but the functionality of the device isn't compromised by my using a different file system. USB stick manufacturers could simply sell their wares unformatted like the old floppy days, or you could pay $0.50 more and get a formatted one. Let the consumer decide.
As for digital cameras... well that was their decision. Unless I, as a consumer, am going to get fined for buying a piece of hardware that was unlicenced I don't care. The patents on FAT were no secret. They were, as are all the other patents, kept in a public place, next to the patents for lenses, CCDs, batteries and jpeg compression. As with any other patent, if you want to use the tech you have to pay the licence... and then pass that cost onto the customer.
Having a single filesystem that is accessible to all is good for everyone, especially Windows users. If Microsoft make it difficult to use digital cameras with their operating systems then they're going to piss a lot of people off. Digital cameras are one of the few reasons people buy a new computer so making it difficult to use digital cameras on Windows systems is not in their interests but perhaps worse for Microsoft is that people will install software that lets them use EXT3, Reiser4, UFS or heavens forbid, HFS+. People could use harddisks from other operating systems, with no need to defrag, decent meta information and genuine multi-user support!
I work with OS X, Debian and NT4 on a daily basis. The only way I can predicitably transfer files between them is using FAT16/32, and the limiting factor is NTs lousy support for alien filesystems. Microsoft should place FAT in the public domain. Its not strong enough to warrent a licence, and should really have become extinct along side the floppy disk. Charging people a licence to use a technology that was chosen because of a weakness in your main project, your operating system, is as lame as lecturers teaching from their own book.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
People, people, this means nothing. The vendors will just ship their USB drives, and flash media unformatted, and YOU will have to format it as whatever you want. It just so happens that FAT is idea for flash media since there is no metadata to update with every access, thus not destroying the flash media by reading it. (Last accessed date, what a stupid thing to have on flash media)
There's an easy way to get around this: simply ship drives unformatted, and include instructions on how to format it. I'm sure there are other ways to get around it on devices such as digital cameras and such as well.
One thing comes to mind with me: iPod tax
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
I don't remember if it was my last USB Jump Drive or SD card that I bought, but the packaging on it said that I would need to format it in order to use it. Since the cards don't come formatted and the user needs to format it, doesn't the company avoid paying the licensing fee?
I guess this would suck for those USB memory companies that are adding software to their sticks.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Those would be even slower than the windows ones.
Where in the food chain does Microsoft expect to get these $25c from? For instance, 32MB USB Flash keys are produced millions at a time for about $10c each in Asia. Are they going to ask $25c for each manufacturer, causing the end-user price to more than double? Or will they charge the end-user?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
...covering storage media as well as the devices that use it?
In that case, manufacturers could deliver their media units unformatted!
Wouldn't that be a solution to avoid the 0.25$/unit?
In the months since the last ruling, MS obviously got to someone (can you say bribes?)
Well, they have spent considerable sums of money "lobbying" members of the US congress, and probably other parliments as well.
But I take it you meant that actual brown paper bags full of cash were paid to certain persons of influence within the USPTO. Quite frankly, I think that not only is this a possibility, it is also a very likely one.
The USPTO is a corrupt organisation. Incompetance is the worst form of corruption, and they are certainly guilty of that. But I think even the most conservative of oberservers would have to admit that there is simply too many suspect happenings within the office to attribute soley to bereaucratic bumbling.
May the Maths Be with you!
does that FAT come with a chair monkeyboy?
Well what's to stop manufacturers putting in the instructions that after purchasing such a device that the customer has to format it themselves? If the device needs software, surely that comes on a CD anyway?
I'm actually glade MS won this. I think it will help clear the way for more devices to use more secure and open-source friendly file systems. But I doubt MS will try to crack the whip on people making technology to read FAT. It just doesnt make sense, plus the income would be so low. And as for drives coming preformatted with FAT. Alot of the flash drives and even some MP3 players I have received from Japan use FAT but dont come preformatted.
I can't say I remember any clowns in the movie so did you mean the Quintisons? Alas I can't find a good page describing just them. I'm guessing the bit you mean where Kup and Hot Rod are given a "trial" (where the heads spin round saying GUILTY) and are dropped into a robot shark infested pool...
They might as well register FAT cat as a trademark whilst they're at it :-)
FAT sucks, but it's ubiquitous. There is no other file system that does what FAT does: Run pretty much everywhere. I take a FAT-formatted USB drive, plug it into a Win box and put some files on it, then I put it into my Linux box and copy the files to my home directory, then I put it into my iBook and do the same there. With a different file system I might have needed to install drivers or use some other method of moving my files around.
Until we can get another file system to where FAT is now we're pretty much stuck with FAT. Unfortunately Microsoft won't support a non-Microsoft file system and NTFS (or any other new file system from Redmond) won't be released as freely as FAT is. Unless the next big rewritable medium has a portable, adaptable (to different media) and modern file system we'll be stuck with FAT until MSFT gets forced to release the NTFS specs or until the Unices reach a 50% market share on the desktop, whichever comes first.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
A fax tax you say? At 25 cents a pound, half of slashdot now owe microsoft 100 bucks.
1. Microsoft spearheads USB standard
2. "Mass Storage Class" added to USB that is so low level, the OS uses it as any disk, needing to support it's file systems
3. 95% of computers run windows and the ones that support USB only support FAT, forcing device manufacturers to use that as filesystem.
4. Patent filesystem and demand royalties after the fact
5. No need for "???"
6. Profit!
Yup, they planned this all along, the sneaky bastards.
Marc McDonald is the inventor of FAT. If memory serves it was created to support Altair Disk Basic.
Bill Gates has received the credit in print. The confusion probably happened because Bill Gates identifies himself completely with Microsoft.
Marc designed it to be optimized for floppies, with an allocation table sized to stay resident even in the tiny RAM of the machines of those days. He always thought it was a little silly to use it on hard disks.
What can you possibly patent about a FAT table? It's more or less a huge array!
;-)
While the rest of the world is exploring new ways to implement filesystems and thus producing innovation, what one of the most rich and powerful software company in the world does?
It bloody well enforce patents about twenty-five-years old bloody technologies.
Silly of me to think they were working to finish that WinFS of theirs, instead.
Look out for your helloworlds, they'll be knocking at your door with patent no. 1340032423 very soon.
PS: How much for these patents to expire? Fortunately I live in Europe, so I can keep FAT support in my GNU/Linux kernel
42.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
why dont the manufacurers team up make their own file system and force microsoft to pay them loyalty's to support it in windows?
I Predict A Riot
Let's recall that even previous slashdot coverage of this issue -- as well as coverage elswhere -- identified that the "fat" patents are written to claim, not the fat-fs as such, but rather, ways of handling long filenames in connection with an underlying fat-fs. (I don't have the links by me to hand right now, sorry.)
That would be much less than a patent on fat as such.
When I last looked at the claims, it did seem that the ways claimed in the patent for handling the long filenames could be subgeneric, i.e. less than exhaustive of all the possibilities. (Granted that a situation like that can still mean that claims are wide enough to be a nuisance.)
So it would probably be more useful to the FOSS community to look at what is actually left from the actual MS patent claims, and whether they leave unpatented, free outside the claims, any other ways of handling the long filenames.
This would be as well as taking account of the possibility that the confirmed patent claims would still be invalidated by prior art or any other reason if it came to a court fight with the opposing party taking a full part there to provide full counterarguments.
This case and its result underline -- again -- the inadequacy of the US patent re-examination procedure -- mainly because of the unequal treatment that it gives to the party wishing to oppose the patent.
A failed attempt to get the patent invalidated is unhelpful to the community, because the patent holder can always point to the result when the prior art arguments come up again, and can argue that they have already been officially considered and rejected, so no need to review them.
It would arguably be better not to use US re-examination in the first place, if there is an assessment that the patent holder could wriggle out of the allegations of prior art when the other party is not there to answer -- because stopped by the procedure from answering to nail the errors in the arguments of the patent-holder.
It might also be recommendable for the PPF, instead of rushing in to raise proceedings that fail when there is no current and urgent need actually to bring them at that point in time, instead to give wide publicity first to the evidence and arguments against a nuisance patent, and to encourage debate about it.
The resulting debate could bring facts to light, e.g. that strengthen the prior art arguments.
New facts and evaluations can also shed light on the defendable scope of the claims, and make it clearer what techniques actually lie free outside them -- maybe even indicating that invalidation proceedings are not necessary.
At least, wider discussion can make it a bit easier for PPF or anybody else to weigh up the prospects of success before weighing in with action.
-wb-
Ever hear of the "microsoft tax" that you pay when you buy a computer? well guess where another such tax is going to be applied to.
whether you use it FAT formatted or not, the manufacturer will be paying the tax to billyboy and transferring the cost (and then some) to you
good luck evading this one
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
As usual with these things, I am struggling with how MS have gotten around what I would see as prior art. The CP/M file system, developed by Digital Research in ~ 1977. I wrote a defrag and badblock utility for CP/M and CP/M-86 in the 80's, and it's not a huge leap from the CP/M FS to a FAT FS. DR are long dead but it still begs the question....did MS really dream this up?
People are asking what the alternatives are. Well, ext filesystems are great, if you're using Linux, but they are totally unreasonable if you, like 98% of the market, is using Windows. Get rid of that idea.
What about one of the ISO filesystems? There's an ISO for CDROM filesystems, and I imagine that thing isn't always read-only. If anyone has a flash disk and wants to format it as an ISO9660 filesystem and see if Windows can read/write it, that would be nice of them. I don't have either.
Second, what product is hit by this? People are going on about shipping unformatted media, but think about it: most devices that use the media have to speak FAT as well. Your camera can't write a file to the flash card if it doesn't understand how to read and write to it, even if rudimentary. The unformatted argument only works for media that will only be used on a PC, which seems like it will be a small minority.
So then, is it the media or the device that will be pinned? If it's the device, that is bad news for open source. That means we lost our ability to write to disks that can be read by Windows. Hey, if the ISO9660 thing from above works, I see no reason why we couldn't format floppies that way, but we still couldn't read them. Will they be able to retroactively collect royalties from Linux distro organizers? Now that is a scary idea. How many copies of Linux have been distributed, even if not used?
How does this work with interoperability? Would it now be illegal to interoperate with a FAT formatted disk without coming to an agreement with microsoft?
Should we be allowed to own numbers? Or the effect they have if interpreted by a machine? Can you own the 'intent' of all number/program generated by something like:
Abstract computers can represent anything you like, and do this as best as the rules you specify. Rules in machine code I'm familiar with come from local properties of a program's numerical / bit representation. That is, aspects of the number the system is sensitive to. This is incredibly powerful. Corporations that own number sets to leverage control over an otherwise freely traversible number-procedural space are scariest to me because they can close off interesting roads ahead in this domain to the non-paying public.
Behemoth corporations with a vested interest in silencing truly free software and stifling various number sharing freedoms despite the happy optimistic nature of their commercials are the last ones I'd wish to be entrusted with such power. Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives to get to the good stuff on the road ahead, and a silly FAT file system will always be available to the various distributions out of country or at least in some encrypted form if the laws get bad enough. If the laws concerning oppressive numeric ownership get too bad, encryption illegalized, and the revolutions fail, and nothing is very much fun anymore, well, I doubt I'd be hanging around anyway (unless hanging around is enforced too).
> 6. Profit!
So that makes Windows, Office and FAT the three things that MS produces that create a profit.
My guess would be UDF, since it seems some already have. eg For more file attribute or larger files support.
It may have been designed for Optical media, but it is suited to any ROM with/without some sort of limited write support. eg Flash memory.
Oh wait...
Last time I stuck a 'factory-new' drive into a Windows box, Windows helpfully identified the drive then offered to partition and format it for me.
I would assume it does the same thing for unformatted USB storage. Shipping blank or preformatted USB sticks is a non-issue.
mp3 players, cameras, etc where the firmware itself needs to be able to read and/or write FAT is where the money will be coming from.
Another nice advantage for Microsoft; All the mainstream Linux distros will have to drop FAT support from their default install, it'll become a downloadable extra like mp3, flash, java, libcss, etc.. a minor annoyance for most Linux users, but IME little annoyances like this are helping hold back desktop linux.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Every OS supports it for the purposes of reading DVDs. It may not have been designed for flash drives, but it works on them fine. And it's an ISO standard.
I am trolling
I really don't mind to buy unformatted USB drives, just the way I used to buy unformatted floppy disks in the past.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
If you put this into perspective on the mono case. Then what will happen when the c# "standard" is widely used?
C# and CLR on linux people take note, Microsoft never acts in good faith. Why file for patents unless you plan to enforce them? Ever heard the phrase "trust a fox"?
That's a well-deserved Intersting, I hope that you get a few more for that comment. UDF really seems to be on the way to ubiquity - according to the 'pedia future versions are even supposed to be engineered towards storage media such as hard drives.
Let's just hope that ten years from now we save our supposed-to-be-portable data on UDF-formatted drives instead of still using FAT.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/W indows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_tdrn.asp
This states that FAT32 is not limited in the specs, but by implementation.
The limitation of 32GB volumes only applies to creating volumes with XP, but a camera or whatever that has been formatted by the manufacturer can be larger.
The more important limit is the 4GB per file limit. It's not so much a limit for a photo-only camera, but for any recording device that records over time, it can be quite important. Obviously there would be workarounds (like DVDs) by using a series of smaller files, but that's a hack.
I'm sure there are flash drives larger than 32GB that exist, though they are probably working into the thousands of dollars. Even if it's not strictly flash, there are plenty of hard drives that emulate flash (ironic, isn't it?). Just about any of the cheap compact flash cards that are above 4GB use microdrives. The filesystem ideas don't change because it's not solid state.
Yeah, use journalised ext FS instead. Why not?
It works on my machines.
PTP is only half-way. Plenty of people still pull the card out of the camera and stick it in their computer. This wouldn't work without special software. Even a lot of printers I see take cards to print directly from them.
So my wife says to me, "Honey, do I look FAT in this filesystem ?"
I replied, "Sweetie, I married you for your trust fund not your cluster size."
Recycled from a previous incarnation/incantation . . .
I'm the author of the Embedded filesystems library. (http://sf.net/projects/efsl)
I've read the patents, they all cover the long filenames ability in the FAT filesystem. So basically as long as I do not implement long filesystem support, the EFSL should be free from patent problems.
If anyone with a deeper understanding of legalese is willing to comment on this, I and the users of EFSL would be grateful.
Since EFSL is targetted at embedded devices, it is used commercially (I am using it in a commercial product as well, and I know of several other projects that are doing the same) and thus the companies using it should know wheter or not they can use EFSL without paying a fee to microsoft.
FAT is about the ugliest filesystem around, it's a shame they dare to ask licensing fees for it.
There is no ext2/ext3 support for 10.4. It only exists for earlier versions.
Would this not also effect the Joliet and Rockridge extensions used on ISO 9660 CDs?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You should be. Put your money where your mouth is and go join the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), as they're doing some good work regarding patents.
So the patents in question all cover the same issue of a "common name space for long and short filenames". This would effect anyone using vfat and also potentially effect Rockridge and Joliet extensions for ISO 9660.
One thing to note, from looking at the licensing page, is that only "consumer electronics devices" and "removable solid state media manufacturers" are targeted. For the moment operating systems aren't listed.
One thing I have to ask myself whether makers of digital cameras would be legaly required to have to pay this license, despite them being listed in the "consumer electronics devices" section. The reason I ask this is because all the digital cameras I have seen to date still use 8.3 format file names (for example my Nikon is DSCN0000.jpg), therefore they are not using the technologies referenced by the patents.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Plain and simple.
Or worse, XP pops up a wizard asking Joe WindowsUser how to partition the new device. He then looks for a CD in the blister-plastic packaging that sadly only includes a Win98 USB Mass Storage Driver.. so he's stuck with a "useless" Thumb drive that he promptly returns to Wal-Mart.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Well IANAL but it seems M$ wants to tax the makers of devices that use the fat filesystem.
If linux supports reading and writing to such devices but NOT formating them (IE:
interoperates with such devices but NOT creating such filesystems) them maybe we are ok.
We should be able to read the fat filesystem on a digital camera (the maker of the camera
must pay the tax since it formats the memory sticks/cards). I think you CAN create an ext2
filesystem on a USB drive if you want to, but most come FAT preformated. If windows can
format a USB drive, then makers of such devices will ship them unformated and owe M$ nothing.
Pass the buck to windows to format the device, maybe even with NTFS (which would render
interoperation of a usb stick with Linux and windows impossible.) I hope nobody decides
to remove the fatfs driver from the kernel just yet (though we might have to remove the
ability to format the fs). Still if M$ gets payment from the makers of such devices it might
be content not to try to milk BOTH ends of the cash cow. After all if such devices won't work
on Linux maybe that would cut somewhat into sales. (maybe new digicams will internally
RUN Linux and use Linux FS to screw Bill??)
Quote: That'd be really bad coz suddenly it [Linux] can't interoperate with all those devices using FAT. /Quote
Bingo!
That's what my money says Microsoft *really* intended by this move.
Micro$oft doesn't give a rip about interoperability; they are big enough that they don't *have* to worry if their products work with other software vendors' products, because they know their users will buy M$ anyway.
How many Windows users really think to themselves, "hmmm...I wonder if this Microsoft product will play nicely with my Linux boxen?"
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
There is one device that I can think off that needs the FAT filesystem preinstalled: the humble iPod.
All the recent iPods come with FAT32 as the filesystem (originally added for Windows users). They originally used HFS+, but that is no longer the case (and hasn't been for quite some time).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod
I am aware that the FAT Licensing page puts a supposed $250,000 cap, but this is M$ and they can change their minds or have other nasty clauses in Licensing agreements that would be unfavourable to companies like Apple. Towards the bottom of the page they even say: "Sometimes, companies may want to negotiate broader or narrower rights than the standard Microsoft license for FAT file systems. In this case, prices may vary." M$ could easily use this to shut iPods out of the Windows market (if they are forced to return to using HFS+ filesystems).
These patents could be very handy iPod killers if M$ wants to use them as such.
The price that a merchant charges for an item is based on his cost to replace that item on the shelf.
How will this effect other DOS systems like DR DOS and FreeDOS?
This is an outrage.
To the USPTO: I am a practitioner in the field - This is obvious.
Sounds like the stock market to me.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
It appears that Microsoft is at least responsible enough to be a patent whore (like IBM) rather than a patent troll (like SCO). The difference between the two? Patent whores have open, transparent licensing terms and use them to earn royalties, not put others out of business or drive them to drop the product in disgust. Twenty-five cents (apparently, capped off at some quantity that most flash manufacturers will exceed anyway) isn't going to break the bank on a flash drive. Even if the manufacturer passes along 100% of the cost and every distributor along the way marks it up 100%, you've added maybe a buck or two to a device selling for more than $25 anyway (not counting drives sold at a loss the day after Thanksgiving).
Actually, the annual cap was a brilliant move by Microsoft. By ensuring that the largest vendors (like Camera makers themselves) pay only a pittance, they're minimizing the risk that someone like Canon might try to roll out its own filesystem to avoid paying royalties. At 2-5 cents per card, it just wouldn't be worth the support headaches.
Plus, as a few have pointed out, a manufacturer could sidestep the royalties by simply not formatting the drive. What's likely to happen is that mass-market flash (bought by Joe Clueless at Wal Mart) will be sold formatted, but made by companies that make enough to easily exceed the capped royalties and end up paying 10 cents per unit or less, and bulk eBay flash (made by smaller companies that would have to pay the full amount) will be sold unformatted, with the expectation that anyone buying a crate of flash drives [or buying on eBay, or buying at a flea market] can be subjected to a little more inconvenience since they can't easily return it the moment they discover it's not formatted and will have to either throw it in a drawer or actually read the instructions and figure out how to format it themselves.
Since FAT has been around for 25 years, how is that MS has a patent on it that hasn't expired?!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
This whole discussion really brings me back to the issues over digital rights management inherent in the PC. What is to stop MS from enforcing this patent and then quietly using its monopoly power to direct vendors to another file system which would contain components to further limit our rights for digital content? I don't know about you guys, but that thought gives me the shivers.
Ship with an old-style FAT filesystem, without vfat. VFAT is backwards compatible, so the devices can write to it just as if it's VFAT.
The device manufacturers will have to pay, but not the media manufacturers.
The irony is that what M$ have patented is their workaround for their own fuckup. And people used it not because it was good, but to stay compatible with them. Get into bed with Microsoft and they will screw you.
Xenu loves you!
The one fortunate thing about this is not only does it apply to iPods, it also applies to every single other media player out there too.
Now, if M$ chooses not to enforce their patent against WMA devices, things could get interesting. Legally, they could. However, I think you'll see a huge public outcry and backlash if they chose to.
You can indeed format a larger disc FAT32 - I have a 120GB disc and a 200GB disc both formatted FAT32, which I formatted myself.
mkdosfs will do it quite happily. And Windows (and Linux) will be happy reading and writing that disc.
So, all you need is a Knoppix disc if you don't have dual-boot on that machine.
-- Soruk
Now perhaps I am being stupid so bear with me a moment. Talk is circulating of Microsoft retroactively demanding royalties for anyone wishing to sell operating systems or devices that will use the FAT filesystem. Much has this been decried in regards to free operating systems like Linux and their interoperability with the rest of the world.
Wait.
Free operating systems.
How does Microsoft plan to extract royalties from the sales of operating systems that are not sold?
Just because the patent office didn't rule the patent invalid doesn't mean it's a valid patent; Microsoft still has to assert the patent in court.
What will happen in court is anybody's guess. On the surface, any recent patent on FAT/VFAT is absolutely ridiculous because the systems were documented and in use for many years. I think there's a good chance that they'll get laughed out of court.
Actually, I'm glad Microsoft is doing this: they are hurting themselves much more than any amount of money they can possibly collect with it. After this, electronics manufacturers are going to be reluctant to adopt any kind of Microsoft format.
IBM used a different method to store long file names on FAT in OS/2. Could that method be adopted by manufacturers?
...the more shall slip through their fingers.
http://rfsd.sourceforge.net/
Or similar projects for ext2.
If the giant flash companies (or whoever is in danger of paying a FAT royalty) instead put that moderate amount of money towards a few full time developers for alternative file system drivers for Windows, we won't need FAT.
And that's a good thing, because FAT is ancient.
The bigger question is what about VFAT support on Linux. It's not THAT big of a question anymore, since just about everyone I know runs their Windows XP partitions (and Vista, I presume) on NTFS, and has to work around proper file system support anyways.
The best answer to Linux support is most likely going to be things like captive NTFS. That way, you can use a MS implementation, and thus not violate any pattents.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I have no clue what you are on, but I never had any trouble formatting my entire 40 GB HD years ago as one FAT32 partition under Windows 95 OSR2. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant the 2 GB limitation of FAT16 under Win 3x/9x and 4 GB under Windows NT (?)
Of course the 32kB cluster size is overkill on my 40 GB FAT32 partition, and I would have been better off partitioning it as 32 + 8, but that's hindsight now....
Not only do we have to put up with the miserable P.O.S. that is the FAT/VFAT file system, now we are also supposed to pay for the privilege. Unfortunately, this is the Microsoft story: first, they monopolize the market with bad technology, and then they try to make people pay for it.
Hopefully, sooner or later, through efforts like these, it will become obvious even to the most clueless of CEOs that adopting any kind of Microsoft technology is a bad idea.
The MS FAT patents weren't originally "rejected" by the USPTO. They were examined, allowed, and issued. The patents were placed into ex parte reexamination after issuance (by the USPTO at the request of PubPat) due to various prior art that the USPTO didn't consider. During the reexamination, the USPTO issued an initial rejection (as is always the case) which Microsoft was able to overcome. The FAT patents were never invalidated or rendered unenforceable. The patents at issue were filed in 1995 and issued in 1996, so your argument that these patents were somehow hidden or unenforceable during that time is entirely baseless.
FFS. This patent is over Microsoft's /implementation/ of FAT, as in the code. This has been covered already in previous Slashwanking. If manufacturers don't want to pay the fee, they can gin up their own FAT implementation or use Linux's free cleanroom implementation, just as long as they comply with the GPL.
I know it's too much to expect readers of this site to RTFA, but still.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
How can you patent something that is 25 years old???
I thought patents were only good for 17 years.
Does this mean "FAT" will be "Free" again in 2022?
Are people really that cheap that they will switch operating systems to save a quarter on a thumb drive?
Why not?
Because a journalised filesystem writes a lot of excess i/o's to the media in addition to writing the data itself.
Flash memory has a finite number of write operations before it "wears out". Yes, even though there are no moving parts, flash memory does "wear out".
> I have no clue what you are on, but I never had any trouble formatting my entire 40 GB HD years ago as one FAT32 partition under Windows 95 OSR2. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant the 2 GB limitation of FAT16 under Win 3x/9x and 4 GB under Windows NT (?)
You sentence started particulary well. It should have stopped after the fourth word, like in:
"I have no clue"
The FAT 32Gb limitation was not present on win 95/98 (because those OSes did not support NTFS). On OSes that supported NTFS, The Convicted Monopoly added this to force people to move to NTFS.
As 95 and 98 are not sold anymore, I suppose that my original sentence "
Did you tried to format a bigger than 32Gb drive under windows with FAT ?" still holds. Even the msdn link confirms it, and the various other posts too.
So:
Yes: Windows XP has a limitation at 32GB
No: There is no such 32GB limit in FAT32
Yes: You can format > 32 GB limit if you are using 'another operating system'. That includes Win95/Knoppix.
next.
That it shouldn't have been an Ex Parte re-examination of the Patent.
There's problems with the whole lot- not to mention funny business with possible prior art and all.
An Ex Parte re-exam means that MS gets to stack the deck and no substantive prior art search will be applied to the whole process- because I can assure you that the USPTO won't be bothering with that one as it costs money unless
other interested parties perform the work for you.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I disagree.
If you consider the possible search space wherin each program's number is located, its almost infinity to 1 for every useful program. What the software patents are meant to protect is the effort expended in finding the program's number within so many possible ways (with practically all ways broken).
And just because a computer contains a processor that is subset of a Universal Turing Machine (e.g. can only run any computable program within finite limits (real UTM's would have an infinite tape)) doesn't mean that the collection of numbers that define a program are not an actual construct. The arrangement of numbers is physically modeled and computed using real physical logic gates and that total state is an arrangement of a machine so it is "real".
I still believe that people should give their software away so everyone else will too - it's like the prisoner's dilemma: if you both co-operate you'll both benefit. With free software what you get back is generally quite a bit more than what you put in.
Shh.
NTFS is not documented in a way that developers can use, and it's also been a constantly changing target over the years. That's why the drivers are considered "experimental" -- the reverse-engineering required to verify the accurace of the drivers is a trial-and-error process.
Why doesn't Microsoft open up NTFS? Because they don't believe in interoperability.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
If you used only long filenames, would the Windows drivers be able to deal with it? Probably. But you do need a space for the driver to write the short filename if necessary; just bzero it in the factory.
Really, the only issue is with organizations wanting to implement FAT--embedded systems with user-writeable media. If I want to sell flash drives pre-formatted with FAT32, I'm not writing drivers, so I'm not violating patents. And if someone else decides that they want to put files with long filenames on the drive I sold them, then that's their affair--as long as their driver supports it, Bob's their uncle.
Who suffers? Manufacturers of MP3 players, mainly, who either need to license FAT, add a Windows driver, or use a form of FAT that implements *exactly one* filename system (long or short, doesn't matter) but still allows both to be written (for Windows interoperability).
And the Linux kernel, of course.
No one should be using this piece of gargabe anyway, not on floppies, not on anything. let MS have their own dog food all to themselves
we all win with this one
even you losers who somehow "need" this filesystem win, you are just too stupid to realize it. no offense to the stupid people who don't use it.
My old Mac was using long file names prior to the 1995 date of this patent application. It also had short file names for backward compatability. Wouldn't that constitute prior art?
as if millions of USB keys and MP3 players suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
Because they ARE evil. All you have to do is read the article:
It also voiced concern that Microsoft would try to seek royalties from companies that sell and support Linux for using the technology, potentially posing a threat to the free software community. Under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's General Public License, Linux cannot be distributed if it contains patented technology that requires royalty payments.
That's quite a spin for what I thought they were pantenting, long file names that have been in use since 1995. But it would make things more difficult. Right now all GNU/Linux distributions can easily read and write to fat, fat32 and NTFS. This is despite previous bogus patents on NTFS. It does not take much effort to see where they are going with this new set of bogus patents.
The US should be ashamed of this. For my own purposes I could care less, having migrated from Windoze eight years ago and having plenty of old knoppix CDs around. I also imagine that it will continue to be possible to get copies of the software from countries that don't have software patents. Linux distributors and newbs will have problems though. It makes honest people look like crooks. Honest people have a right to access their data with free software and should not have to jump through dirty hoops to do it. The USPTO sucks life.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So rather than charge $0.25 for certain items, many posters want to install other filesystems? So now when joe consumer wants to use said device, he has to install a driver. And of course no two companies will use the same driver when they now get to install stuff - no, they will install all their apps and user crap, so now instead of having simple, working devices, joe consumer has multiple drivers and associated crap from several different companies. And if he wants to take his MonkeyFS USB device to another machine, it won't work. He'll have to install more drivers. And he cannot use any locked-down PCs like libraries (should be), or Kinko's, or other machines he cannot install his drivers on.
And then, when something doesn't work, he calls customer support, eating up many of those $0.25 charges when the company has to deal with the mess they created by not using something that just works.
Plus, each manufacturer has to license or write another OS driver for their use, whether it is in their camera, PDA, MP3 player, etc., which also might eat a few $0.25.
So it seems cheaper from manufacturer and consumer viewpoints to pay the $0.25. And before any halfwits get bent out of shape, you might want to see what other patent fees these device manufacturers pay. I'd bet this is not the only one by far.
It's a quarter folks, and it works. Easy for the company to pass on to the consumer. And I'd happily pay $0.25 additional for every device if it just works. Especially if I don't have to load a driver for each device and on each machine. Heck, while working I easily make $1 per minute, so installing a driver or dealing with nonstandard filesystems at work would be a further waste of $.
It's a quarter. The patent will expire. It's a good thing none of you are making business decisions for some company based on such pure unreasoning anti-microsoft bias.
Though with the PTP protocol, and the new MTP protocol for media players, the choice of file system can become irrelevant. Implement using a decent fileystem designed for flash and hide the details behind PTP.
Of course the companies will weigh up developing such a system versus just paying the royalty, and also a change will upset users accustomed to using external card readers. You'd have to ship filesystem drivers for your flash filesystem.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If Slashdot has at least 100,000 members (well, it's closer to ten times that, but....) and half of them owe $100 due to this patent at $0.25/pound, that's 50,000 people sharing 400 pounds of fat between them. That's 0.008 pounds of fat each.
Given an average body weight of, say, 130 pounds (averaged between male and female), that's less than 0.01% fat each. How many Slashdotters are starving to death as we speak?
I actually looked at the specification. The long name is stored in directory entries which old DOS ignores, but they *reference* a single directory entry with the short name. So, the whole information about the file *except* the long name must be in another entry, together with the short name.
Hth,
Dscho
Yea, but does it run on Linux? /ducks
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
A copyright covers original bits in the code (comments, or any places where the code itself can be changed without impacting how it does it).
A patent impacts the method the code uses. Independently written code which follows the same algorithms still infringes on the patent.
In cases where a patent describes a method for storing content in a standard format, there may be no reasonable alternate approach to writing data in that format -- in effect, the algorithm may be dictated by the format -- making the patent impact all sane implementations of said format.
I'd say the FAT patent is non-obvious if (and only if) no prior computer operating system or intelligent disc storage system was already using it -- and no CS textbook published prior to 1981 described it. There was plenty time from the first RAMDAC drives through the IBM PC for anyone else to have developed such an obvious way to track disc sector availability. If no one did, then it wasn't obvious.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Consortium of Flash disk manufacturers: "Here is FlashFS, our better, more efficient filesystem designed for Flash disks. From now on, we'll make Flash disks preformatted with it. Mr. Gates, please feel free to add FlashFS support to Windows, at the generous licensing fee of 50c per copy of Windows."
MSFT: "Screw you. The FAT filesystem's good enough so we'll keep that. Besides, we own it."
A few months later, the drives that come preformatted with FlashFS aren't selling all that well. Most users get confused by the CD-ROM with the FlashFS driver that comes with them and don't want to have to install that on every machine they carry files between. Some buy the drives and reformat them with FAT, while others find that too intimidating and go for the (50c more expensive) preformatted drives. The colossal gains in efficiency, speed, data integrity and longevity that FlashFS offers are lost on the vast majority of users, who don't see anything wrong with FAT. The consortium quietly discontinues FlashFS, and sheepishly returns to Mr. Gates.
Consortium: "OK, you we're right. We want to use FAT again, and will happily pay 50c per unit."
MSFT: "Actually, we've revaluated our licensing, and it's now $2.50"
CDs came out in the early '80s. BYTE had an article on CD-ROM and the ISO9660 file system in May 85.
Patents last for 20 years (actually, at the time it was 17). Shouldn't any patents on CD have expired?
Any lawyers out there know?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Thats why Linus needs to move the kernel.org server not from California to Oregon, but from Oregon to the EU*. That way MS can bitch all they want about vFat in the kernel, but can't get it out of the kernel cause the EU (for the time being, and if MS does try to enforce this agienst Linux, won't ever) have software patents.
*this would also mean Linus and everyone working on the kernel would have to move to the EU, and also a fork in the kernel in the US that does not included vFat.
I am not a lawyer, but it looks to me like this won't affect many products:
(a) media is not affected, as it can easily be shipped blank, and can be quite happily formatted by the appliance that uses it in whatever format it uses,
(b) most digital cameras don't use the FAT long filename hack, sticking to 8+3 filenames, like \DCIM\100CANON\IMG_0001.JPG. This is not actually covered by the patent, so as long as the manufacturers don't put in long filenames (and digital cameras don't need them), they get off free.
The main types of devices affected would be things like MP3 players, which recognise long filenames (or should, at least). Microsoft could in theory sue to remove the vfat filesystem from the Linux kernel, but the amount of ill will generated by doing so would probably exceed any competitive benefit gained.
Ah, but if I steal the $25c in the woods when nobody is looking will it still be a crime?
Sigh. Another patent article without the patent numbers (5,579,517 and 5,758,352). Of course, the old patent numbers are only half-useful, since the claims could have been amended during reexamination.
Does anyone know what the claims say now? I mean, half the posters here seem to think these patents cover all of FAT, not just VFAT.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
As Microsoft is being sued by forgent over jpeg patent issues. Karma's a bitch, ain't it.
I'm getting interested in this stuff. What is an extent, and how does it work?
Your original sentence did not specify which version of Windows. I CAN format it with Windows. Therefore your statement is still wrong. Next time, you should mention NT-based or something more specific, since there is still a significant Win 9x userbase out there (like it or not, that's a fact.)
Can you provide a link to this MSDN article that you mention? Does it say that I cannot format a FAT32 volume on Win 9x larger than 32 GB? If so, the article is wrong. It certainly would not be the first time that I have seen errors in an MSDN article....
An advanced filesystem like FAT should be patented. Otherwise someone might steal this advanced technology from Microsoft.
.. Linux supports VFAT, but they aren't paying royalities. HMMM
To the best of my knowledge the patents are the 1995/96/97 patents that do with VFAT and long filename support. You can format a flash device without knowledge of VFAT yet windows will still be able to store long filenames in it. So Microsoft can't really collect fees for flashes (at least from what I understand).
Now if you have a digital camera you can display the 8.3 filenames for free, but you would have to pay to use the algorithm to display the long file names.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Game over, Microsoft. I win. You lose.
We should just ignore this, and let the damage be done to businesses in the US. Just another example of a nonsense patent damaging the competitiveness of business, and yet more clear evidence that software patents are the creation of corrupt US politicians, most of whom are raving religious right wingers or corporate lackeys.
DON'T WORRY. MICROS~1 CANNOT HURT US AS LONG AS WE GET USED TO SEEING OUR WORDS AND SENTEN~1 WRITTEN LIKE THIS. I REALLY DO NOT SEE WHAT ALL THE COMMOT~1 IS ALL ABOUT ANYWAY.
All your data are belong to us.
You'll have to pay the MS tax if you want to read it.
Ha Ha Ha Ha
Why not remember the MTU and use CODOS circa (what) 1972. To heck with MSDOS.
http://www.mtu.com/support/mtucomputers.htm
But wait! That was 5 freakin years before Bill's brief hotel innovation where he tossed off DOS!
Not like there was prior art (hey, RDOS from DataGeneral in 1970.)
But I really like DOS 3.3 from Apple... but that's 1979. Or ProDOS in the early 80s.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
and they all have problems and issues. I haven't lost any data, but I've had plenty of read/write failures. This wouldn't be acceptable for a major company even if it didn't also mean having the user install software to access their drive. The tech support costs for that alone would outweight any license fees.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't know about you, but every time I visit the UDF, I get FAT!
If you consider the possible search space wherin each program's number is located, it's almost infinity to 1 for every useful program.
Not at all! Let's say a useful program these days is somewhere around 8MB. That's 2^23 possible combinations. For the purposes of this discussion I'll assume the number of useful programs in that search space is small enough that we can estimate the odds of finding a useful program in that search space as around 1:2^20 (nice, round number... I wouldn't say there are only 8 useful programs in that search space, but whatever...)
Now, for this "almost infinity to one" thing... comparing the magnitude of infinity to 2^20, there's an infinite factor of difference there. Clearly 1:infinity is a much smaller probability than 1:2^20. 2^40, 2^60, 2^80 are all equally distant from infinity.
Perhaps more to the point... The challenge of finding a useful program in that space by a completely random process is a much different task from crafting a useful program by using the abstractions with which we structure code. Any reasonably good programmer could create FAT or VFAT - though no two implementations or designs are likely to match exactly, there are countless different implementations and designs for the filesystem structure which would have similar practical advantages and weaknesses. (For instance, compare VFAT to UMSDOS... Completely different implementation but they have roughly the same characteristics) The problem is that the value of this one design has been artifically boosted, because it's become a de-facto standard with which devices are expected to be compatible. No one is interested in VFAT these days for its technical merit, they're interested in it because Microsoft's OS uses it and they want to be compatible.
My prediction? Microsoft will do their best to make device manufacturers pay for VFAT, or even FAT if they can manage it. (But who's going to want FAT without VFAT?) Focusing mainly on consumer-visible devices like cameras and such. Then they'll also provide a better filesystem for these devices - maybe NTFS or maybe something new - and to encourage people to use it in devices they'll make it cheaper, or possibly no-cost. With this new filesystem being officially sanctioned by Microsoft with support on MS systems, it may be enough to convince manufacturers that it's a reasonable transition path. They may even make sure it's supported on Mac. But they'll make damn sure they control every aspect of this technology.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
It doesn't really matter anymore. Modern flash supposedly supports so many read-write cycles that it would take years of heavy, constant, writes to wear out the flash chips. (Sorry, can't be bothered to dig up a link -- especially while at work. =) ) Other than a swap file, for all practical purposes, it just doesn't matter. Besides, for Windows users, NTFS gives you benefits besides journalling such as security, encryption, and compression.
it doesn't have to be GPL just like the nvidia drivers aren't GPL it just taints the kernel and purists don't like that.
the fact its not in 2K either makes me think its more likely an implementation screwup that they didn't bother fixing.
did drives bigger than that even exist when win2K came out? (over 6 years ago now iirc)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
google says it's several contiguous blocks of data.
So my guess is that when you can put data together in order you just keep track of the start position and length. Since you want to put data together on disk anyway, this saves a lot of space as long as the drive isn't fragmented.
Can someone clarify whether this licensing only applies to FAT32? It doesn't seem like FAT16 could be covered by any patents at this point, having been implemented since DOS 2.0. (Either it would be out of patent coverage, or it would have been commercially available for more than 1 year before it was patented.)
Since FAT16 is fine for filesystems up to 2GB (and you can get around this with multiple partitions)...and seeing as how most flash memory cards are 2 GB...are there any devices that need to license FAT32? I can see where it might be useful in the future, but no current devices would need it.
I just took a quick look at the three referenced patents...they all seem to apply to the use of long file names (eg. c:\progra~1 mapping to c:\Program Files). I can't think of any cameras that use long file names (my Kodak camera only uses 8.3 names). Again, these patents don't seem to be all that necessary for many manufacturers.
No, it's c$, centidollars. Metric currency, yay!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Any project that can read from LVM? (default ubuntu install - dual boot with windows xp). This drivers in parent for win32 doesn't seem to read anything but /boot
what's to stop a hypothetical Microsoft from "patching" windows so as not to accept any non-preformatted drives?
It depends on the approach Microsoft takes with the patch. What is the text of the error message that such a modified version of Windows might give if the user inserts an unformatted block storage medium? All versions of Mac OS Finder and Windows Explorer to date have offered to format any media that do not carry a recognizable file system.
Then put two file systems on the disc, one read-only file system using the pre-1986 version of FAT (as all U.S. patents filed before 1986 and granted before 1989 have expired) and one flash-specific file system for data storage. The read-only FAT file system would have a small (< 100 KB) Windows executable that installs a driver for the storage file system. Would that work?
Ok. So it's 25c per unit? But then realize that's only one patent. In the US and regions weak enough to be forced into "Free Trade" agreements mandating US sw patents, there are tens of thousands of other sw patents which can potentially get royalties. Many of these patents have been lifted from comp sci text books, RFCs, existing programs and even established best practice. But the USPTO says they're good, so you gotta pay. Closed source, open source, developer or user - you gotta pay.
If any device or is affected by even 1% of these many tens of thousand of outrageous patents @ 25 c per patent per unit, the added cost passed on will be significant. Say 30000 sw patents, 0.5% are relevant with royalties of 10c per unit per patent, that's an added cost of $38 per unit, not counting the 'administrative' costs and gouging which will get tacked on. Cool, everything just got more expensive without changing a thing.
Software patents: the sugar in your gas tank on the "information superhighway"
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You should watch your step, or at least clean your bathroom.
Besides, my copy of Sid Meier's Pirates (the original one) is on a 3.5" DD (not HD) floppy, and it boots to the game.
Luckily it doesn't appear to use FAT. (Which is why I don't have a backup.)
[Notice how that wad of tangents and non-sequiters got back to the topic, before getting off-topic again?]
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Allow me to correct here.
It's not the 8.3 length filenames that are patented. It's the way directories are structured and free space are handled in the FAT (File Allocation Table) file system.
As for MS-DOS being based on CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors), PC-DOS (first incarnation) and MS-DOS (non-IBM version) are based on QDOS (Quick & Dirty Operating System) which was written as a CP/M work-alike that Bill Gates was able to purchase rights to on very short notice. While it is likely that QDOS used the CP/M file format on floppy discs so that it could read CP/M discs, I've never heard that confirmed.
But if MS-DOS, by way of QDOS, was based on CP/M floppy discs, than that should be more than sufficient prior art to invalidate at least the original FAT system, which was originally FAT12 (FAT 12-bit). And FAT16/32 are very obvious extensions of FAT12.
But there's another reason MS doesn't deserve a FAT file patent. IMHO and IANAL, they waited far too long to file for it. You shouldn't be able to patent something so far after the fact that everyone has adopted using it because it wasn't patented. That's just Malum In Se (wrong in itself).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
of this news is that VFAT drivers will be dropped from the Linux kernel tree, at least for USA-based distros. No Linux publisher will want to take the risk of losing a lawsuit for _intentional_ patent infringement.
Look how quickly GIF and MP3 support were dropped from apps included in mainline distros once patent claims were asserted.
If it's true that the patents only cover the hideous SFN/LFN kludge, then that hugely reduces who's affected. A flash drive might come with a FAT file system on it, but since there are no files it can't infringe. And digital cameras etc. are OK as long as they write 8.3 filenames, and how long do you really want a randomly-generated filename to be? The Linux driver would be screwed though, as well as the LFN TSRs for real DOS.
"...patent re-examination process bars the public from rebutting..."
It would seem to me that this would remove the ability to redress. IANAL of course, but it seems to me that this is an appeal process, and violates so many constitutional guarantees, that some lawyers would have a field day.
Such a filesystem would not ship ready-to-use in Microsoft Windows or MacOS X. Therefore it would not be as convenient for users who are ignorant of a political fight that affects them directly.
If one is going to have to install additional software to avoid patented filesystems, better to use one that already exists (like ext2 or ext3) rather than invent a new one. There is software to do this for Microsoft Windows, perhaps software exists to add support for this in MacOS X as well.
Finally, it's not the cost of the license fee that scares businesses off (so I doubt that adding a quarter to the cost of a memory card will raise eyebrows). I suspect that business managers would rather buy into something and feel like they're on solid ground rather than dealing with something that might place them as the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit later. The problems businesses face with cross-licensing should tell any businessperson that such solid ground is a myth, and buying a license for a patent doesn't necessarily clear the licensee for other patents. But so many businesspeople will buy into it that they end up creating "de facto standards" that are simultaneously technologically inferior and lock the FLOSS users out: widespread support for the encumbered MP3 lossy audio codec instead of the unencumbered Ogg Vorbis lossy audio codec which is most comparable to MP3 in terms of function; FAT16/32 support instead of any version of ext; Apple making yet another lossless audio codec (that has not gained a significant audience, by the way) instead of using FLAC (but I'm sure Apple supporters will further the larger point I'm making by showing how this was done to further lock users in with "features" that make DRM possible, "features" which FLAC lacks).
Digital Citizen
Umm wtf? Is that even legal? What happened to free speech.? How much did Microsoft pay for this ?
Not even addressing the ramifications of them winning this, if they decide to demand royalties on most everything flash based on the planet..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The examiners must have been on crack.
This patent will be overturned the first time anyone fights it in court. It is not possible to patent something which has been in commercial use for more than a year.
Vfat has been in commercial versions of Linux for at least 9 years. If Microsoft has spent 10 years getting this patent they have already lost half of its useful life since the patent laws have changed to a 20 year from application total time .
The Patent also fails in court because of obviousness.
This is a classic example of a "lawyer" patent; that is lawyers love to spend money patenting things for companies since they make money by doing so. The bosses at big companies don't realize the patents are worthless, and they get all excited about them.
By the way almost all patents are rejected by the examiners the first time through.
While the essential domains still remain under lock and key (e.g., Congress, the courts, patent reexaminations), the decline in newspaper readership as people move to the Net has--possibly briefly--democratized speech in the world's "greatest democracy."
But that still doesn't mean you get to say boo about M$ patents. That's the cost of freedom. ;-)
I doubt the Average Joe would access the camera's as drives. He/She probably uses the program that comes with the camera to download and organize the photos. For such people it doesn't matter if the camera uses EXT2 or FAT. I guess that should solve most of the problem. As for us techies, we can always use the EXT2 driver for Win.
-ItsME
> Cameras, on the other hand, have to save their images in a structured way ...
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I thought the M$ patent was about the "long filename" method, not the organization of the more than 25 years old file system. All Cameras I've seen so far use the old 8+3 characters format and that's not patented.
A different issue is support for long filenames under open source OSes. That would not be possible without patent violation, so perhaps a solution is to use another method of doing them under FAT (M$ has a patent on one method, not on the concept of using strings longer than 8 characters as filenames) and portray the method used under DOS/Windows as a limitation of that system (that is, create a FOSS utility for DOS/Windows that converts the proprietary FAT system to an "open" one that is compatible with all systems except for long filenames on "unpatched" Windows systems. It would still be compatible with the basic "shortname FAT" and would probably work with long filenames with the same issues that about 90% of the world population deals with anyway when moving files that are named with some characters between different systems (or differnt drives on the same system, or between compressed archive and file system, etc.)
Google desktop could incorporate such a "patch"...
They can still be struck down by SCOTUS.
http://outcampaign.org/
I guess old age has blurred my memory but didn't Digital Research first come up with the File Allocation Table Scheme on CP/M?
> MS could "open up" NTFS and sell the driver, but Linux would not be
> able to use it. No software under the GPL may contain licensed
> technology that requires royalty fees.
True, the Linux kernel couldn't include Microsoft's royalty-licensed driver. However, as a Linux user, I could (without violating the GPL) pay for and use such a driver on my Linux system.
Correction: any other Linux user could. I couldn't, but for philosophical reasons rather than legal reasons.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
So now that they've been re-granted, when do they expire? Is their expiry based on the 1996 inception date, or the 2006 one?
This patent expires 20 years to the day after its effective filing date, in the mid-1990s. If the patent term clock started over after every examination, it would violate "limited Times" even more flagrantly than the Bono Act is said to.
A few things to keep in mind:
In regards to the long versus short file names. FAT (actually, VFAT) is the only FS I know of that does this. The ext2 filesystem has no use for "short" file names. There are several other File Systems available on Linux, and AFAIK none of them have short and long file names. Short file names as described in this patent are a hack on the FAT file system, and are very specific to DOS and pre-NTFS Windows.