Hi Shane and others, http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp is very old news. As discussed on our topica mailing list on 5 December 2003 (yes, twok and three), the three mentioned patents are all about long file name processing only. MS wants money from people who build USB memory sticks and digithingies which use FAT on memory cards, and tries to make the vendors believe that this is about FAT32 (well, maybe MS stopped to do that by now), but actually it is about LFN.
This is probably the reason why my pocket mp3 player device only shows ID3 tags and short file names but no long file names. The vendor would have had to pay 25 cents per device to MS otherwise... http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/download/hardware/fatgen103.pdf (of year 2000) contains some comment / license info telling that EFI / boot stuff may use FAT anyway, same for diagnostics, and same for "manufacture, install and setup any hardware, firmware or operating system software". Well maybe they only meant you can compile Linux on FAT disks, but I guess it ended up meaning that they cannot complain now about Linux being able to mount/use FAT disks...) As said, patents #5,579,517 #5,758,352 #6,286,013 are about long file names. See the 2003 Topica archives ;-). FAT32 is not sufficiently different to FAT16 imho and FAT16 is more than 20 years old by now. Patents ought to expire. As there is, uhm, "ongoing development" in FAT world, the patents for new features might also support a longer lifespan for the 80s FAT12/FAT16 patents, who knows. But that would be sufficiently ridiculous... Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
