On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 04:42:33PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: > <quote who="Kevin Waterson"> > > > Do I get $0.25 refund if I format my flash card as ext2? > > Why do you think your vendor will charge you for the format of their media?
Because http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp says: A license for removable solid state media manufacturers to preformat the media, such as compact flash memory cards, to the Microsoft FAT file system format, and to preload data onto such preformatted media using the Microsoft FAT file system format. Pricing for this license is US$0.25 per unit with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per manufacturer. > Talk about nasty grey areas. The patents, should anyone actually care about > them, would affect software implementation of functionality provided by FAT > rather than media formatted with FAT. That's covered too: A license for manufacturers of certain consumer electronics devices. Pricing for this license is US$0.25 per unit for each of the following types of devices that use removable solid state media to store data: portable digital still cameras; portable portable digital audio players; portable digital video players; portable digital audio/video players; multifunction printers; electronic photo frames; electronic musical instruments; and standard televisions. Pricing for this license is US$0.25 per unit with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per licensee. Pricing for other device types can be negotiated with Microsoft. Cheers, John -- whois [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG key id: 0xD59C360F http://kirriwa.net/john/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
