Microsofts FAT-patents!

[jaboua]

Just read on osnews.com, http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=13256

"After 2 years of examination the U.S Patent and Trademark Office has reversed its two earlier unofficial decisions and decided that Microsoft's File Allocation Table file system constitutes a "novel and non-obvious" system enabling it to be patented. This coupled with Microsofts plans to charge licensing fees for use of the system could cause many problems for open-source operating systems that implement the file system, or even to mp3 players."

On another note, I read about http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php which would make a legal MP3-plugin (legal in the countries where MP3 is patented, Europe doesn't have software patents)

[winter]

heres two revisoins to the IP laws. 1 the technology must be iniative and not be currently widely used. Two you should market and maintain the danm thing...once you stoped marketing or maintaining it, it becomes public domain

[jaboua]

heres two revisoins to the IP laws. 1 the technology must be iniative and not be currently widely used. Two you should market and maintain the danm thing...once you stoped marketing or maintaining it, it becomes public domain

Yeah, FAT is one of the most used FSs, memory sticks, harddisk partitions, MP3-players... It doesn't affect anything here in Europe directly, but this is still going to affect the OSS community in general, we may see FAT-support disappearing in many distros in the near future for legal reasons, I'm thinking of spesificly distros like fedora, which dropped support for MP3 because of patents.

[chopin1810]

Microsoft doesn't even maintain the thing anymore, I think they've totally trashed it for Vista for NTFS (which is a lot better) ... Why do they even need to patent it, it's practically open-source by now...

[Roxoff]

Yeah, FAT is one of the most used FSs, memory sticks, harddisk partitions, MP3-players... It doesn't affect anything here in Europe directly, but this is still going to affect the OSS community in general, we may see FAT-support disappearing in many distros in the near future for legal reasons, I'm thinking of spesificly distros like fedora, which dropped support for MP3 because of patents.

lol, yeah - Fedora got round it by moving their support 'offshore' - you can get support for any of these commercial formats from livna or from dries/dag repos, so it's not like they're unavailable, or that they cant be incorporated completely seamlessly into the operating system. They wont remove FAT or FAT32 support from Linux because it's not patentable in Europe, and its still extremely useful. The worst that will happen is that it wont be available as standard, and you'll have to add it from another repository.

[scientica]

why patent it? I can think of a billion or so more or less serious ones:
* 'coz they want to (power full excuse)
* they want to prevent it from ever beeing used again
* they wana stop FOSS using it (in the USA, which some belive to be the entire world :P )
* they need a new source of cash now that windows isn't generating any cash any more - sue sue sue, sure...
* they got a twisted sence of humor
* they just wanted to test what was patentable, next up is "ending execution in a random, nodeterminal non-standard but not limietd to method ("crashing") a pice of software"
* they got boored and wanted to upset the OpenSource community
* ...

[Roxoff]

why patent it? I can think of a billion or so more or less serious ones:
* 'coz they want to (power full excuse)
* they want to prevent it from ever beeing used again
* they wana stop FOSS using it (in the USA, which some belive to be the entire world :P )
* they need a new source of cash now that windows isn't generating any cash any more - sue sue sue, sure...
* they got a twisted sence of humor
* they just wanted to test what was patentable, next up is "ending execution in a random, nodeterminal non-standard but not limietd to method ("crashing") a pice of software"
* they got boored and wanted to upset the OpenSource community
* ...

Hmmm, for Microsoft, there's probably just two reasons:

1. to make life difficult for FOSS, and Linux in particular

and

2. it's the thin end of the wedge - the beginning of a wider patent campaign for other technologies that it, theoretically, owns.

I cant see them really wanting to limit use of it - it's already too ubiquitous, and it'd be pretty futile and time consuming to try.

[winter]

its probably to make money, you see mp3 players and flash media producers would have to pay if they wanted to use the fat file system.

As for MS enforcing this paitent...they rarely enforce pataints