Microsoft FAT Patent Upheld 558
theodp writes "After initially rejecting Microsoft's File Allocation Table (FAT) patents, the USPTO has ruled them valid. From the article: 'Microsoft has won a debate where they were the only party allowed to speak, in that the patent re-examination process bars the public from rebutting arguments made by Microsoft, said unimpressed Public Patent Foundation President Dan Ravicher.'"
So now... (Score:5, Interesting)
But what new FS will that be? FAT32? EXT2/3?
Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So now... (Score:2, Interesting)
NTFS would be an obvious choice for microsoft to go with since it support removable media and journalling. That would probably truly piss off camera makers, however, because NTFS support is probably neither cheap to license nor fun to stuff into cameras. It's a sad state of affairs that the best de facto standard anyone could come up with is FAT, and even worse that I can't think of a good universal replacement. Perhaps the BSD fast file system if only because of its widespread availability and public domain(ish) nature.
Re:So now... (Score:5, Interesting)
What exactly would prevent these low margin, high volume USB key manufacturers selling their memory sticks unformatted? It's not like hard drive manufacturers have to pay a FAT tax -- it's just the device manufacturers whose stuff actually uses FAT, like digital camera makers.
Re:So now... (Score:5, Interesting)
But as it caps at $250,000 the really high volume guys will be able to spread it out more... $250,000/10,000,000 = 2.5c
software that can create it? (Score:3, Interesting)
USB Sticks and CF cards (Score:5, Interesting)
As for digital cameras... well that was their decision. Unless I, as a consumer, am going to get fined for buying a piece of hardware that was unlicenced I don't care. The patents on FAT were no secret. They were, as are all the other patents, kept in a public place, next to the patents for lenses, CCDs, batteries and jpeg compression. As with any other patent, if you want to use the tech you have to pay the licence... and then pass that cost onto the customer.
Having a single filesystem that is accessible to all is good for everyone, especially Windows users. If Microsoft make it difficult to use digital cameras with their operating systems then they're going to piss a lot of people off. Digital cameras are one of the few reasons people buy a new computer so making it difficult to use digital cameras on Windows systems is not in their interests but perhaps worse for Microsoft is that people will install software that lets them use EXT3, Reiser4, UFS or heavens forbid, HFS+. People could use harddisks from other operating systems, with no need to defrag, decent meta information and genuine multi-user support!
I work with OS X, Debian and NT4 on a daily basis. The only way I can predicitably transfer files between them is using FAT16/32, and the limiting factor is NTs lousy support for alien filesystems. Microsoft should place FAT in the public domain. Its not strong enough to warrent a licence, and should really have become extinct along side the floppy disk. Charging people a licence to use a technology that was chosen because of a weakness in your main project, your operating system, is as lame as lecturers teaching from their own book.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Is the patent... (Score:1, Interesting)
In that case, manufacturers could deliver their media units unformatted!
Wouldn't that be a solution to avoid the 0.25$/unit?
Corruption a Certainty (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, they have spent considerable sums of money "lobbying" members of the US congress, and probably other parliments as well.
But I take it you meant that actual brown paper bags full of cash were paid to certain persons of influence within the USPTO. Quite frankly, I think that not only is this a possibility, it is also a very likely one.
The USPTO is a corrupt organisation. Incompetance is the worst form of corruption, and they are certainly guilty of that. But I think even the most conservative of oberservers would have to admit that there is simply too many suspect happenings within the office to attribute soley to bereaucratic bumbling.
Re:So now... (Score:5, Interesting)
But when a user pops their CF/SD/XD/whatever card out of their camera, they're going to want to access it without installing drivers, etc.
Personally I don't mind cameras, etc using ext2, or even better - a proper flash filesystem designed to deal with the problems inherent in writing to flash. But then I don't use Windows...
I'd be interested to know what the monopoly-police think about this - it seems that requiring people to pay a licence fee to use the only supported filesystem in the monopoly OS to allow interoperability with other devices might be considered an abuse of their market position.
It's also worth thinking about - the Linux kernel infringes this patent. Is Linux going to have FAT support ripped out of it now? That'd be really bad coz suddenly it can't interoperate with all those devices using FAT.
FAT sucks, but there's no alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
Until we can get another file system to where FAT is now we're pretty much stuck with FAT. Unfortunately Microsoft won't support a non-Microsoft file system and NTFS (or any other new file system from Redmond) won't be released as freely as FAT is. Unless the next big rewritable medium has a portable, adaptable (to different media) and modern file system we'll be stuck with FAT until MSFT gets forced to release the NTFS specs or until the Unices reach a 50% market share on the desktop, whichever comes first.
More accurate history of FAT (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill Gates has received the credit in print. The confusion probably happened because Bill Gates identifies himself completely with Microsoft.
Marc designed it to be optimized for floppies, with an allocation table sized to stay resident even in the tiny RAM of the machines of those days. He always thought it was a little silly to use it on hard disks.
Patenting arrays? (Score:5, Interesting)
While the rest of the world is exploring new ways to implement filesystems and thus producing innovation, what one of the most rich and powerful software company in the world does?
It bloody well enforce patents about twenty-five-years old bloody technologies.
Silly of me to think they were working to finish that WinFS of theirs, instead.
Look out for your helloworlds, they'll be knocking at your door with patent no. 1340032423 very soon.
PS: How much for these patents to expire? Fortunately I live in Europe, so I can keep FAT support in my GNU/Linux kernel
Short file names? (Score:3, Interesting)
Rich.
CP/M 2.2 Prior art? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So now... (Score:5, Interesting)
You wouldn't want to use standard journalling on a flash drive. IIRC for each write cycle at least 3 write actions are required: log in the journal that a write will be done (has to be synced to the disk), do the write, log in the journal that the write action ended successful. With flash, where you can only erase block-wise, this is not a good idea - for one its very slow, and on the other hand, the flash supports only so many write cycles. For journalling, special handling is needed as implemented e.g. in jffs2 [sourceware.org].
Re:Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
Do they (MS) want companies to licence formatted drives or does operating systems also get included for simply being able to read/write to an already formatted fat file system? I somehow doubt that the second example is enforcable...
Re:So now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So now... (Score:1, Interesting)
Did you tried to format a bigger than 32Gb drive under windows with FAT ?
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/
Of course, this is an artificial limitation put in place by the Monopoly You Defend, so people have to swtich to even more proprietary NTFS file system for big drive.
Extern USB/FireWire hard-drive vendor ship you a formatted bigger than 32Gb hard drive.
But don't try to re-format them.
You can't.
What about UDF? (Score:5, Interesting)
C# (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about UDF? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is a bit heavy, but nowadays that should not really matter.
Re:CP/M 2.2 Prior art? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Food chain (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Food chain (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Even if they do have FAT pre-installed, that doesn't matter. A patent applies to the device that is using the FAT system (camera, computer, etc.), not the media it is on. (For example: A patent woudl apply to a printing press, but not to the book that is printed by the press.)
2) His point is that they don't have to have it pre-installed anyway. The device you put it in can do the formatting easily enough.
Also, just because something is modded-up that you think is wrong, doesn't mean that the moderation system is bad. You may be modded down merely for the comment.
non m$ dos? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
I do not do no-win-no-fee work, full stop. I either work for money or for free, but never mix the two.
Anonymous EPA
Re:So now... (Score:2, Interesting)
You can format a volume by writing a bootsector, clearing out the FATS and writing an empty root directory. No filename creation is necessary, and so you don't infringe on any patents I'm aware of.
See this tool for an example
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm [demon.co.uk]
You could, I suspect, write a FAT file system which supports long filenames and doesn't use any of the techiques mentioned in the patent I think. In fact it would be interesting if someone who knows about patent law could confirm this.
First some background - each filename on a FAT partition has a short filename. It may also have a long filename. Most of the time, the short filename is essentially invisible to the user. Windows, Linux and Mac will only ever display the long one. Dos and bootstrap code relies on the short filename, but that's a very special case. Short filenames must be unique though, since chkdsk will 'fix' the disk in bad ways otherwise.
Essentially, I'm thinking about using a different algorithm to generate short names, something like appending the file's position in the directory in Base 32, e.g. 0-9A-V. Since FAT directories can have at most 65536 files and usually have far fewer, this is pretty compact. There's a corner case where someone tries to create a file which collides with this scheme, but I think that it's solvable, especially if you can live with the limitation that you can only open files by their long filename.
I'll write a web page with the solution, so it can't be patented by anyone.
Re:Prior Art and Billy (Score:3, Interesting)
To get something going right away, Microsoft bought a variant of CP/M-86 as the core of MS-DOS 1.0, and included many of the older conventions of CP/M as well. Some of the file access methods including early FAT organization was introduced as well.
In all fairness to Microsoft on this point, when MS-DOS 2.0 came out, there was a fairly substantial change to the architechture. It wasn't until DOS 2.0 that hard-drive support was offered at all, and the need for something like FAT as it currently exists. DOS 2.0 also supported sub-directories for the first time and tree navigation and diagnostics tools.
That was all still more than 20 years ago, which still begs the question about what the patents really cover and if they are original research, as most ideas in FAT were hardly new even when Microsoft used them in later versions of DOS and Windows.
NTFS might have some claims of originality, but that is another beast entirely and has its own pedigree.