M$ wins FAT patent, open source may lose

"...But in a decision filed last week, examiners sided with Microsoft, which noted Tuesday that a "patent re-examination certificate," signifying conclusion of the issue, is being prepared. Microsoft had argued that it developed the FAT in 1976.

"Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, had said if Microsoft was successful in licensing the patents, it could add "millions of dollars annually to consumers' expenses for digital photo storage, and (raise) the cost of digital cameras throughout the world."

"The patent decision could represent a proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over the open source community, because Microsoft could, at least in theory, seek royalties for Linux. Microsoft has given no indication it plans to use the patents against the open source community...."

http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/175803597

This is somewhere that I actually trust them. They haven't done anythign to the open-sourced community as of yet and I don't think anyone will argue that FAT and NTFS are their creations... I hope they don't go back to the sue everybody you can for 5$ though, that would suck.

They'll only screw themselves in the end.
Cameras and all will switch to another (open source) format, like ext3 or rfs, and THEY will have to make their software open source if they want to support it... :-)

Ok, that may be a long shot, but it would be cool, right? :-D

A similar thing happened with jpeg compression. Forgent has claimed the rights to technology used in jpeg. It has sued a bunch of companies so far seeking royalties. So far over 50 companies have forked over more than $105 million. Yahoo just recently settle with Forgent and has agreed to pay licensing fees. When they get through with the big companies will they go after open source programs that use jpeg?

December 15, 2005
Yahoo Bows to JPEG Patent

Only one more reason to use PNG.
Not to mention alpha levels. Who needs JPEG?

Well, pretty much all pictures are compressed with the jpeg format. The internet seems to work fine on gif, but jpeg for photos...

First off all, jpeg and png are not similar and png is not introduced to replace jpeg, it was introduced to replace giff, png is lossless and jpeg is not.
By the way, who cares about fat, here is list from linux fdisk, some of that types might be used instead of fat:
1 FAT12 1e Hidden Win95 FA 75 PC/IX be Solaris boot
2 XENIX root 24 NEC DOS 80 Old Minix c1 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
3 XENIX usr 39 Plan 9 81 Minix / old Lin c4 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
4 FAT16 <32M 3c PartitionMagic 82 Linux swap c6 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
5 Extended 40 Venix 80286 83 Linux c7 Syrinx
6 FAT16 41 PPC PReP Boot 84 OS/2 hidden C: da Non-FS data
7 HPFS/NTFS 42 SFS 85 Linux extended db CP/M / CTOS / .
8 AIX 4d QNX4.x 86 NTFS volume set de Dell Utility
9 AIX bootable 4e QNX4.x 2nd part 87 NTFS volume set df BootIt
a OS/2 Boot Manag 4f QNX4.x 3rd part 8e Linux LVM e1 DOS access
b Win95 FAT32 50 OnTrack DM 93 Amoeba e3 DOS R/O
c Win95 FAT32 (LB 51 OnTrack DM6 Aux 94 Amoeba BBT e4 SpeedStor
e Win95 FAT16 (LB 52 CP/M 9f BSD/OS eb BeOS fs
f Win95 Ext'd (LB 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux a0 IBM Thinkpad hi ee EFI GPT
10 OPUS 54 OnTrackDM6 a5 FreeBSD ef EFI (FAT-12/16/
11 Hidden FAT12 55 EZ-Drive a6 OpenBSD f0 Linux/PA-RISC b
12 Compaq diagnost 56 Golden Bow a7 NeXTSTEP f1 SpeedStor
14 Hidden FAT16 <3 5c Priam Edisk a8 Darwin UFS f4 SpeedStor
16 Hidden FAT16 61 SpeedStor a9 NetBSD f2 DOS secondary
17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 63 GNU HURD or Sys ab Darwin boot fd Linux raid auto
18 AST SmartSleep 64 Novell Netware b7 BSDI fs fe LANstep
1b Hidden Win95 FA 65 Novell Netware b8 BSDI swap ff BBT

I couldnt care less, fat sucked, and rightly belongs to the sucky company that wants it.

As for things like flash cards? They will probably just switch to an open source like ext2 which seems to me a good thing.