Am 4 Dec 2003 11:14 meinte Vintage Computer Festival:
> On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Fred N. van Kempen wrote:
> > To my own laughter and surprise, Microsoft now claims to have the
> > rights to the FAT file system, and intends to execute on a licensing
> > program for it, with obvious results.
> > Wasnt FAT done (in crude format) by MP/M or CP/M86 already *before*
> > Microsoft? They claim it was developed by them in 1976, but I seem
> > to recall it being mentioned before that, around 1974-ish or so,
> > by homebrew people (such as CP/M et al.) ??
> It's a total joke. First of all, the patents referenced on their FAT
> licensing website:
> http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp
> ...are for long filenames. They have no patent on FAT, and for good
> reasons: 1) software patents were not allowed at the time that FAT was
> implemented in MS-DOS, and 2) FAT was basically lifted from another OS.
I think the trick roots deeper. First of all, it does not look
like they are sueing anyone, it's only that they offer licences
for their _source_code_ to handle FAT media. Now, if one buys
that (and may be inclined to do so to get LFN (*1), he also agrees
that his knowledge to handle such structures is from Microsoft, and
therefore, whatever he will develop, he will never be able to get out
of that, as long as his software supports FAT. it's a one way trap.
Also, if enough people accept, it sets the standards for future court
issues.
What pisses me of most is that they want licence for media if they
are formated with FAT. Beside that this is even more a joke than
the Rambus scam, it sets the stage that not only software (and the
underlaying algorythm) is protected by a patend but also the data
generated by this algorythm!
Let's just continue the idea: Assumeing MS had a patent for some
parts of Word, under the above circumstances, every document written
using Word, stored on a media will be the same ... so does MS own
what I write, because I'm using their programm?
I wouldn't realy say FAT is directly lifted from _one_ other OS, it's
a nice development starting from CP/M and other sources (as the intenion
of the original developers have been).
> I have no idea why MS would be so stupid as to think people are going to
> fall for this, which is basically a sad-assed ruse. Also, I highly
> question the history they are promulgating. They claim they developed FAT
> in 1976. That seems a bit early. I could be wrong.
Jup, that is the most ridicoulous par ... now the original MS-Basic
had even FAT ... next thing they tell is that it also had a GUI and
of course invented the Internet ... all in MS-Basic :)
Gruss
H.
*1 - to me, LFNs are not realy a new idea - at least not the way they
are implemented for FAT .... that's exactly the same scheme CP/M already
used 20 years before to handle more than 16 data blocks: spread out a
file entry over several directory entries.
--
VCF Europa 5.0 am 01./02. Mai 2004 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/
Received on Thu Dec 04 2003 - 14:01:39 GMT