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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."
Embrace
---- You are here ----
Extend
Extinguish
(Thanks slashdot formatting-filter for making me sacrifice my ascii art skills.)
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."
Why do you always look at Microsoft will "all" the disdain?
Experience.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... umm... you won't get fooled again.
Snide comments aside, it's simply that it's been too many times the case. Of course MS is in the business to make money. But to that end, vendor lock-in is one of the golden tickets to cash cows. If you can monopolize, you can charge whatever you want and nobody can undercut you. You can dictate price, conditions and format, what your user may or may not do with your tools and so on.
Yes, MS is in the business to make money. And doing what we "accuse" them to do is the easiest, most profitable and most sustainable way. So I guess we might be correct?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game.
Creating a software product and selling it is fair enough. Creating a standard, expecting everyone to use it, then charging a license fee for it is _evil_.
That's like the power company deciding to sell you power. Then charging you license fees for installing power sockets in your home that conform to the standard.
FAT looks like someone's half-baked science project. FAT32 and exFAT (aka FAT64) just take the same mistakes and repeat them.
The fact that FAT32 is widely available is irrelevant; everyone will still have to install drivers.
So, yes, there's a demand for a simple (needing little CPU and RAM) filesystem. There's even an argument to be made that it should honor the same overall contracts that FAT does so that device manufacturers don't have to put lots of extra logic in. But it does *not* need to be the spawn of FAT.
So a mediocre but patent encumbered technology gets adopted as a standard because it runs out of the box on Windows. As Microsoft itself puts it, "exFAT is relatively simple". Hello, antitrust regulators? Hello, patent office?
Are you serious? I wonder, have you ever heard of:
* The AARD code?
* OOXML?
* The Halloween documents?
* Embrace, extend and extinguish?
* Samizdat?
"Have some faith", you say? Indeed, to trust Microsoft to act ethically is a matter of faith: to believe in something incredible against all evidence.
Circumcision is child abuse.
That driver has a serious user-unfriendly limitation: No support for inodes larger than 128 bytes.
This means Linux users can't use GUI tools to format a USB stick (or a harddisk partition for sharing files with Windows) - they must use the command line and figure out how to persuade mkfs.ext2 not to default to 256 byte inodes. And this probably after learning of this limitation the hard way. Easy enough for you and me, but definitely not user friendly.
Also, this still leaves Windows users unable to format as ext2. A crashy driver is not enough.
That brings me to the third problem: I have yet to see a stable IFS (Installable FileSystem) driver for Windows. In my experience, perfectly stable Windows installations start crashing when an IFS driver is installed and in use. I suspect this part of Windows needs more debugging, or the API needs to be better documented, or both.
exFAT may be a patent encumbered extension to a lame filesystem, but the ext2 drivers for Windows are a lousy counter proposal.
...Microsoft is in the business of making money...
No, that is a secondary goal. The first priority for Microsoft is control, technology ownership and monopolization. Even at a financial loss.
See IE, XBOX, dotnet, Silverlight, etc, etc
)9TSS
Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game. What's wrong with that? Did you want Microsoft to go the Linux way and "donate" the software for "free?"
Get a life...Have some faith.
Well, what is wrong in the customers resisting the profit motivated actions of their vendors? Customers have as much right to protect their money as does Microsoft have for making their profits.
Some actions of the vendors, including Microsoft, enhances the productivity and competitiveness of their customers. Rightfully the vendors, including Microsoft, are entitled to a share of the extra profits generated. But some other actions by the vendor, does not enhance the productivity or competitiveness of their clients, and the customer would be better served by switching to a competitor of the current vendor. Actions by the current vendor that prevents this switch by vendor lock would hamper the clients from employing their money, maximizing their profits etc. And we have as much right to highlight to potential long term danger and make everyone aware of it.
Why is Microsoft and its apologists are so against people making informed decisions? Vendor lock is real. Companies are hurting from it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact