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Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing
alphadogg writes "Microsoft Thursday announced a broadening of its licensing program around its exFAT file system, which is designed to handle large multimedia files. Microsoft hopes companies making devices such as cameras and smartphones will adopt the Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology to support the sharing of audio and video files. The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE."
Why, when you can pick up ext2 for free?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
EEE only applies to open standard Microsoft targets.
It also applies to Microsoft partners. The multi-media product manufacturers (including cameras, media players etc. etc.) will be the long term target. Right now their functionality is being extended with the aim of Microsoft getting lock in. Microsoft is already one of them (with it's Windows Mobile phones and XBox at least). Later, when they need to expand their market, they will wipe out the multi-media companies that have become locked in.
The thing is, and I know this from working in a potential victim company and discussing with the person who was negotiating with MS for media standards, that the extinguish is at least five years away. Almost nobody working in such a company cares about that far in the future.
Only companies, like Oracle, which decide to fight Microsoft from the beginning as hard as they can, will ever survive long term in such a market.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
FAT looks like someone's half-baked science project.
Quite so. I remember writing an experimental filesystem for 3" (not 3 1/2") floppies on the Oric in 1982, making up my own concepts as I had no experience in the matter. It didn't really work but it wsa good learning. Then a couple years later I looked at the details of FAT and was surprised by how simple, similar and limited it actually was.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
> Unless Microsoft somehow coerced the association to select exFAT
Of course they did.
Microsoft do not support third-party file system drivers. It's certainly possible to write them, but documentation is scarce, there are few tools available, and it's intended for use only in embedded systems. It's not possible to provide the same level of integration as the Microsoft-provided drivers, since none of the disk management tools are extensible by anyone but Microsoft. The IFS drivers themselves are far more complicated than filesystem drivers in any other operating system, since they have to implement functionality that is normally provided by the operating system's VFS layer, and that functionality isn't well documented. Basically, all existing third-party IFS drivers suck.
The SDXC committee needed the memory cards to be usable on Windows, ideally without installing any drivers, and without having to screw around to get it to work. NTFS is completely unsuitable for flash storage, and is far too complex to implement in an embedded device anyway (not that Microsoft actually license any part of NTFS out to third parties anyway).
That leaves UDF, which can not be used on anything but optical discs in Windows XP, FAT16, which can't be used for drives larger than 2GB, and FAT32. FAT32 can actually scale well into the terabyte range, but Windows will refuse to format a disk as FAT32 if it's larger than 32GB.
Microsoft's solution was exFAT. The selection of exFAT instead of FAT32 was forced by limitations on Windows' FAT32 support. These limitations were intentional - the idea was to get people to use NTFS instead of FAT32. The only party to benefit from this situation is Microsoft - they get to sell licenses for their (apparently) patented new filesystem, which they can't do with FAT32 (cameras never used the patented VFAT extensions). In addition, they get to kill off one of their own filesystems, which was being used as a common interchange filesystem between completely different systems, none of which needed to run Windows, or use any Microsoft technology.