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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?
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!
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.
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
The grandparent posted is correct.
1) Even if they do have FAT pre-installed, that doesn't matter. A patent applies to the device that is using the FAT system (camera, computer, etc.), not the media it is on. (For example: A patent woudl apply to a printing press, but not to the book that is printed by the press.)
2) His point is that they don't have to have it pre-installed anyway. The device you put it in can do the formatting easily enough.
Also, just because something is modded-up that you think is wrong, doesn't mean that the moderation system is bad. You may be modded down merely for the comment.