FAT FS and licensing

Microsoft wants manufacturers to pay a licensing fee to use the FAT filesystem. Shame it's a "standard" now as it's got to be one of the mosty crufty hacked filesystems ever. Microsoft can charge a licensing fee as they've got a number of patents regarding FAT. It's a $0.25 fee per device with it capped at $250,000

Isn't this a counter intuitative thing to do? Most people use FAT because it makes it easier to interoperate with Windows. Okay, it's quite simple as well but after this manufacturers will think twice.

Why would Microsoft want other operating systems to play nice with Windows? They'd much rather have everything be Windows-only, and I'm sure that's what this intended to be headed toward. Just a slightly modified version of ``embrace and extend''.

Ah. I know that. Microsoft aren't well known for being helpful to anybody but themselves.

The first license is for removable solid state media like Compact Flash.

The list of devices that are covered by the second license is "portable digital still cameras; portable digital video cameras; portable digital still/video cameras; portable digital audio players; portable digital video players; portable digital audio/video players; multifunction printers; electronic photo frames; electronic musical instruments; and standard televisions"

This means my next digital camera which uses FAT will have a Microsoft tax added to pay for the license. Great...

I'm okay with charging a fee for using IP but I don't think they should decide to do it after everybody has implemented it in their products. I've looked at the FAT specifications before and there wasn't any mention of needing to license it from Microsoft.

Oh. I didn't consider that.

Maybe someone will get on writing some filesystem drivers for Windows. Of course, that removes the lingua franca-ness that made FAT cool. And that was certainly the only thing that made it cool.

I agree, I think it's despicable for Microsoft to try to collect licensing fees so late in the game, for something that's became so widely used because it didn't need a license.

The only reason I'm using CompactFlash adapters is because I know I can plug the card in and be able to directly reach the camera's pictures as loose FAT files. It works only because Canon was using FAT without paying fees to Microsoft. If it weren't for that free "standard", the disk format would be proprietary and I wouldn't have wanted to buy the flash adapters.

This sounds very similar to the GIF debacle, which I think is also despicable.

I hate Microsoft.

It's also "fun" writing filesystem drivers for Windows. It's nearly impossible to do without having the IFS (Installable File System) kits from Microsoft which aren't cheap. Anybody else that wants to recompile your FS driver would also require the IFS kit...

Maybe one of the companies that stands to lose a load of money over this will bankroll a GPL'd ext3 driver or even an ext2 driver for windows.

I would wager much money that if they did, FAT would suddenly become free again.

edit: oh goody goody! someone has already started. And another. Maybe one of these guys could get paid to further their development.

I don't admit to being very knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, but it appears that they are licensing Microsoft's FAT system... specifically their technique of squishing long file names into a system that only supports 8.3...

It was pointed out to me that this was an attempt to hit up the camera makers for using FAT for their smart media and compact flash... But I have never seen a camera that uses long file names? I would have to assume this is a non event?

Microsoft designed FAT originally and they've done the main modifications since then. It went FAT12 -> FAT16 -> FAT32/VFAT. Novell/DR did some twiddling to their FAT implementation in DRDOS but it never took off as Microsoft never implemented the same changes.

FAT32/VFAT expanded the size of the tables to accomodate larger disks and also introduced a kludge to store the munged up long filenames into multiple 8.3 directory entries.

A file with a long filename has several directory entries. One that has the short 8.3 name and a bunch of others to store the long filename. Since they've got to keep it compatible with old systems they made it store 10 characters of the long filename in each of the extra entries. The first character in the new entries is flagged as being a deleted entry so it should be ignored by anything that doesn't understand long filenames.

The license is for everything that involves FAT. Even if you only used the short 8.3 names then you'd have to pay the fee unfortunately.

but, if the patents are only on the long-filename extensions, where is the stick to back up the carrot? what basis would microsoft have to sue a camera maker who is not infringing those patents, should they choose not to license FAT?

--dan.

but, if the patents are only on the long-filename extensions, where is the stick to back up the carrot? what basis would microsoft have to sue a camera maker who is not infringing those patents, should they choose not to license FAT?

I'm guessing here, having not read the patents or the M$ page, but even if there's no patent to cover FAT, the FAT code or FAT structure itself could still be copyrighted. You don't necessarily need a patent claim to back up a license, a copyright is sufficient.

No idea. But I don't think that's going to stop Microsoft. They also claim they've got several other patents which haven't been granted yet.

From the wording they seem to mean that you have to licence it if you use any implementation of FAT. But the patents they've listed specifically only mention having dual namespaces for files. If you look at some of the others it references then it begins to become very vague. IBM have patented the idea of munging long filenames into shorter ones. Microsoft have patented a Flash EEPROM updating mechanism in 5392427.

There is actually a Microsoft patent in there for an interrupt handler which runs in both protected and real mode...