On Wed Dec 10, 2003 at 11:16:22 +1100, Peter Hardy wrote: >On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 10:56, Matthew Palmer wrote: >> On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 05:38:33AM +1100, Kevin Waterson wrote: >> > MS is set to begin charging a license fee for FAT file system >> > FAT is used by camera manufacturers and more importantly is >> > used on Compact Flash cards used by digital cameras. >> >> Don't know why. It's utterly shite for flash memory, since FAT keeps >> hammering the same sections of the device, and flash has a limited number of >> write cycles before it dies. JFFS2 is much nicer, I'm told. > >Because FAT is ubiqituous. How does a hardware manufacturer like Canon >go about making Windows support a new filesystem? > >A tiny little part of me hopes that the hardware manufacturers do pony >up, because otherwise they'll most likely be resorting to dodgy >proprietary means of reading and writing to their storage, which will >become a huge bugger if you want to use an operating system they don't >support. > >Perhaps more importantly, what does this licencing mean to Free FAT >implementations, like the the ones in Linux and *BSD? If they're >somehow exempt, why don't all the camera manufacturers start using a BSD >licenced one? :-)
They probably already are! Of course like I've mentioned before the patents only cover the long file name extensions to FAT, and the cameras I've used all seem to use 8.3 anyway. So more likely if the patent thing *does* become an issue camera manufacturers will just use 8.3 filenames. Benno -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
