Ouch!

[Ian Malone]

Scot L. Harris wrote
 > Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 11 Jan 2006, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>
>>>> ... My guess is that this particular patent is just to increase the
>>>> # of patents that M$ currently holds - and that is all that is
>>>> needed.
>>>
>>>  
>>> i'm not sure i agree.  as a previous poster mentioned, a patent on
>>> the long names featurs of FAT has the potential to impact a lot of
>>> handheld/digital/personal devices -- PDAs, digital cameras, etc.
>>
>> 
>> Especially since MicroSoft gives the terms of the license, I
>> believe that they intend to enforce their patents, and make
>> some money doing so.
> 
> 
> This could be a good thing.  It will get many of those companies to use
> an unencumbered file system format on such devices.  Which should force
> support of those file systems into Windows....

Are there many viable alternatives about?  FAT has the advantages of
being quite simple and fairly lightweight in processor power and speed
for small filesystems, and most device manufacturers are already used
to licensing technologies.  Alternatively they could just revert to
8.3 support for files, it wouldn't affect usb key applications as
windows is handling the file system then (but it's a blow to
interoperability, USB keys wouldn't work between Win and Mac or Linux).

I'd like to see an open format make it, but I'm not sure there are
any on the horizon.

-- 
imalone