Fat copyright

[ASHLEY4]

Hi all
Does any one no, if MS own's the FAT eg(fat12 fat16 fat 32).
As i saw a artical at :

http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5113033.html

that says that MS is going to license FAT ,Where does this leave people like me that use it for there OS ?.

[df]

they 'own' it in the sense that they bought it with dos v1.0 iirc...

so yeah they 'own' it. but i wouldnt worry bout licensing it or being prosecutted for using it. its pretty much available everywhere. its the most understood filesystem in existance (bar fat32)...

[Pype.Clicker]

there is a distinction between the intellectual rights (The guy who wrote the code for FAT filesystem and the related work owns that work. He is the author of it: noone can reject that), the commercial rights (Microsoft bought them: they're the one who can decide if the code can/cannot be distributed, and at what cost) and patents (there are none for FAT, afaik).

Copyrights do not protect ideas. They do protect their expression. Having a copyright on a FAT driver does not prevent somebody else to write another FAT driver and that somebody else will have copyrights on its own driver. Patents can.

True Type rendering, for instance, are patented, which means that, in some countries, you have to pay MS to distribute some code that renders true types (which explains why it's so hard to find good true type renderers for Linux, for instance).

[Curufir]

True Type rendering, for instance, are patented, which means that, in some countries, you have to pay MS to distribute some code that renders true types (which explains why it's so hard to find good true type renderers for Linux, for instance).

AFAIK it's actually Apple that hold the patents that require a license to use hinting in True Type fonts, not MS.

As for the FAT thing. Is it the source to the driver they're offering? Because the FAT specs have been floating around the net forever and are publically available on the MS servers.

[Pype.Clicker]

AFAIK it's actually Apple that hold the patents that require a license to use hinting in True Type fonts, not MS.

oops.

As for the FAT thing. Is it the source to the driver they're offering? Because the FAT specs have been floating around the net forever and are publically available on the MS servers.

Actually, FAT is so easy to reverse engineer that many people have been publishing their own "how FAT works" document ... until MS get bored to see those approximate things and decide to release the One True Document you can now find on OSRC.

[Tim]

The main sources of documentation on FAT are the FAT spec from Microsoft, and the FASTFAT driver included in the IFS kit (the source code to NT's FAT file system driver).

And, of course, the description of the FAT format included in the new FAT patent. Sigh.