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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!
How will this affect the ability to read FAT filesystems under Linux?
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!
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!
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)
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
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?
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
If you put this into perspective on the mono case. Then what will happen when the c# "standard" is widely used?
How will this effect other DOS systems like DR DOS and FreeDOS?
Microsoft was in the business of writing compilers in 1980, not operating systems. IBM wanted to buy the Microsoft compilers for the IBM-PC, but after getting the cold shoulder from Gary Kildal, Microsoft decided to include an operating system as well in their proposal.
To get something going right away, Microsoft bought a variant of CP/M-86 as the core of MS-DOS 1.0, and included many of the older conventions of CP/M as well. Some of the file access methods including early FAT organization was introduced as well.
In all fairness to Microsoft on this point, when MS-DOS 2.0 came out, there was a fairly substantial change to the architechture. It wasn't until DOS 2.0 that hard-drive support was offered at all, and the need for something like FAT as it currently exists. DOS 2.0 also supported sub-directories for the first time and tree navigation and diagnostics tools.
That was all still more than 20 years ago, which still begs the question about what the patents really cover and if they are original research, as most ideas in FAT were hardly new even when Microsoft used them in later versions of DOS and Windows.
NTFS might have some claims of originality, but that is another beast entirely and has its own pedigree.