This is FAT

Yesterday Microsoft announced that they are going to begin charging royalties for companies that include the FAT file system on their devices. The fees appear to be set at $250,000 per company for a license, and 25 cents per device. This file system is included on digital cameras that use compact flash, smart media, SD, etc, so naturally SanDisk and Lexar were the first to license the technology.

Digital cameras need to have this filesystem in their embedded OS so that they can reformat these cards. Based on who produces these chips/embedded OSes, you'll see these companies begin to pay up for their licenses. That would be Kodak, Sony, Canon, Nikon, HP, Agfa, Windriver,.... (this list will go on for a while...)..

Preformatted floppies come with this filesystem on them. Maxell, 3M, and other companies who for some reason let part of their company fall off the tech bandwagon somewhere, will have to start charging .25 extra per floppy (of course if you're using a Mac, who cares?)

OS X includes this filesystem (to be able to read floppies/CDs/digital media cards), and it is unclear whether MS will be charging for the ability to read this filesystem, so this may affect Apple. Even so, $250,000 is not a very big sum for licensing. It is not a WELCOME added cost, but a reasonable amount for any of the aforementioned companies to afford.

The article mentions that possibly the reason for this shift in IP licensing is to encourage more companies to upgrade/update their systems to OSes that use NTFS (Windows 2000/XP/Me) which analysts see as a good move. I believe that there are more insidious reasons for this push:

1. NTFS filesystems include DRM capabilities. If/when companies switch from using FAT to NTFS, the reason will be for DRM. This falls in line with their "trusted computing" environment.
2. Linux uses the FAT file system. Red Hat, SUSE, and all the other distributions would be dead in the water because of this. Because:
a) Linux communities historically have been unable to raise money to pay for licensing. (Does anyone remember the effort to raise money for the DVD license?)
b) Even if a company (Red Hat for example) paid the fee, they would only be able to distribute a binary for the filesystem. This would violate the GPL, which the Linux community thrives upon.

The short story here is that most likely, Microsoft is using their IP to finally try and begin to kill their adversaries. Let's face it, MS being an $870B company, doesn't need the paltry $250k, and digital cameras are NOT their competition. Linux operating systems are.

I believe that it can be argued that the FAT filesystem on Linux was reverse engineered (circa 1992) when reverse engineering was legal (pre-DMCA), and if the dozens of coders who have contributed to that portion of the Linux project can prove that they have never seen code for the FAT filesystem, that the Linux community will have a rock-solid defense to keep this technology in their distributions. I'm sure that sometime in the near future, they will be asked to prove this. If they can't, the results will be devastating.