EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: Koen on January 25, 2016, 10:08:29 pm
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Hello,
as I understand it after reading about the TomTom case, FAT32 "Long filename" is still subject to licensing by Microsoft ? Is this correct ?
Thank you very much,
Koen
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The issue is complicated, but as far as I can tell, yes, the FAT32 long name patent is still valid in the USA (but not in Germany). I don't know if Microsoft has a simple way for you or me to license it. Linux gets around the patent by not completely supporting the long name feature in FAT32.
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WTMFF? (That's a MF added to my WTF!)
Microsoft were granted a patent for pretty much "storing two filenames on a disk"???
Wow!
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WTMFF? (That's a MF added to my WTF!)
Microsoft were granted a patent for pretty much "storing two filenames on a disk"???
Wow!
No, they were granted a patent for a way of storing both long & short filenames for each file, in a way that neither you nor anyone else had done before.
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WTMFF? (That's a MF added to my WTF!)
Microsoft were granted a patent for pretty much "storing two filenames on a disk"???
Wow!
No, they were granted a patent for a way of storing both long & short filenames for each file, in a way that neither you nor anyone else had done before.
Pfffft, I'd been doing it that way for years! And storing a medium length filename too, just for a laugh...
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The issue is complicated, but as far as I can tell, yes, the FAT32 long name patent is still valid in the USA (but not in Germany). I don't know if Microsoft has a simple way for you or me to license it. Linux gets around the patent by not completely supporting the long name feature in FAT32.
... and everyone else just doesn't give a toss what M$ thinks. Linux vfat driver supports long filenames.
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... and everyone else just doesn't give a toss what M$ thinks. Linux vfat driver supports long filenames.
Not completely true, Linux community cared enough to have the vfat driver patched specifically to avoid infringing the two Microsoft patents about long file names in FAT.
The trick is that either a long file name or a short one is stored for a file, never both at the same time (with some compatibility limitations).
See https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/26/314 for the FAQ.
Whether this kind of patent should or should not be granted is another story, but since they are in place (mostly US), better safe than sorry.
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Doesn't the patent expire soon if it hasn't already expired?
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Doesn't the patent expire soon if it hasn't already expired?
Yes, not easy to understand if you are not an expert in the field (and I'm surely not!) but either they both expired in 2013 or one did in 2015 and one is going to in 2016... :-//
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No, I'm not an expert but going by the release dates of Windows 95/98, it's likely the patents would have expired or soon will.