<quote who="Kevin Waterson">
> MS is set to begin charging a license fee for FAT file system
(Uh oh, anti-MS ranty pants thread...)
They're charging a license fee for THEIR CODE, on top of the statement that
there are patents related to the FAT filesystem. These include the long file
name mapping method, which has fairly obvious and clever prior art (UMSDOS)
in our operating system of choice.
So, when embedded developers are using BSD or Linux code on their devices
already (or using very simple FAT12ish filesystems), and may not have any
inclination to care about Microsoft's lame patents ("So why pay MS at
all?"), this whole thing will most likely be a flash in the pan. Imagine if
MS decided to take Sony to court over it. That would be amusing.
(This does seem to be an indication that they're cranking up their legal
wheels though.)
- Jeff
--
GVADEC 2004: Kristiansand, Norway http://2004.guadec.org/
"It's actually my new bandwidth conservation technique: compresion of
al double leters." - Telsa Gwynne
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
