Fat File System Licensing?

[truekaiser]

the only thing that might happen is they will have to ship the pandora with fat & fat32 support not compiled in the kernel, like *buntu, debain, fedora, and free versions of mandravia linux will probably do.

The funny thing is that all those distros (well, I have not tested it under Fedora, but) (K)(X)Ubuntu, Debian, and Mandriva (at least, when I used it back in the days when it was Mandrake) have it compiled in. In fact, I've been using Linux since 2003, and I don't recall a time when it was ever not included in a default kernel (well, maybe not in DD-WRT, but...on the other hand, it does have the option to use an SD/MMC card).

Thats because in the past none of them thought microsoft was ever going to sue someone with their fat & fat32 patent since they basically let it slide for YEARS. The tomtom case proves otherwise so they will most likely remove fat & fat32 support in their next release if not remove it with a kernel patch. Whats up in the air is what the kernel devs will do, will they put a big warning in the descriptions of the options to enable support for those two file systems? will they move them to the staging ara of the kernel and be slated for removal? Or will they do nothing?

 

[sindbad]

Also, if copyright holders, trademark holders, so on and so forth do not protect their rights they can in effect lose them - and the ability to collect fees from large companies as well as small ones. Being small or not turning a profit does NOT make you invulnerable.
You're defending patent trolls. Very unpopular thing to do.

 

[Monk]

Also, if copyright holders, trademark holders, so on and so forth do not protect their rights they can in effect lose them - and the ability to collect fees from large companies as well as small ones. Being small or not turning a profit does NOT make you invulnerable.
You're defending patent trolls. Very unpopular thing to do.

Not my purpose (either to defend any form of trolling or to be popular).

On the subject of copyright being different to, say, trademark yes they are different (as is trade-dress) but I was bundling for general effect rather than exactitude. Copyrights can also be extended, which is another form of actively protecting their IP rather than letting them slide and losing the rights.

Ta

 

[daeglin]

Seriously, just fu^H^Hignore them. If there is a problem, ship Pandoras without operating system and let the users to install it themselves. This is of course impossible for TomTom but the audience for Pandora are hobyists who should be able to that.

It is not possible cover all existing patents anyway. Just keep watching the most notorious patent Trolls.

 

[Bronek]

There are couple of relevant post, will try to reply to them all.

QUOTE
Also, if copyright holders, trademark holders, so on and so forth do not protect their rights they can in effect lose them - and the ability to collect fees from large companies as well as small ones. Being small or not turning a profit does NOT make you invulnerable.
You"re defending patent trolls. Very unpopular thing to do.

Not my purpose (either to defend any form of trolling or to be popular).
EDIT: fixed citation.


nor mine. Just want to point out some corporations have very sharp teeth, and I do not want to see Pandora in trouble. Whether or not something is "popular" or "ideologically correct" or even "defensible" is no concern to me; business is.

 

[Monk]

They have been doing that for years and basically told Microsoft where to shove it. Nobody pays Microsoft for this, ever. It's a complete non-issue.

and yet...

currently they are suing tomtom (first serious case on fat?)

In fact it seems TomTom have caved and Linux distros ARE in danger of losing FAT access (at least, Tomtom's version is) - from:

CODE
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/03/microsoft-and-tomtom-settle-patent-dispute.ars


we have:

QUOTE
Microsoft and TomTom have settled their controversial patent dispute, which included allegations that the Linux kernel infringes on Microsoft's filesystem patents. TomTom has licensed the patents from Microsoft, but intends to remove from its Linux kernel the code that is covered by the patents.


and most notably:

QUOTE
TomTom has paid to license Microsoft's patents, including those covering FAT.


I expected this would get looked into with a sharp eye when the SD licensing issue came up and this was menetioned, but whether OP looked then, or before, they are at least taking it seriously now:

we have someone looking into it.

So if it isn't already covered - which it may be - it should be covered* by the time Pandora goes out the door.

Ta


*Covered does not mean paid - it may involve payment, or it may involve OpenPandora saying "We don't need to pay that", or... whatever. They're on the case, we're told.

 

[gp32rich]

Is this M$ way to stifle Linux?

Do they want a controlling interest in OP?


Is the Redmond Borg going to assimilate the world with patents?

 

[sindbad]

Is this M$ way to stifle Linux?
Do they want a controlling interest in OP?
Is the Redmond Borg going to assimilate the world with patents?
Meh, they're not the only patent troll, just a more visible one.

I keep thinking that UDF would be a good replacement for FAT. It works on any OS, the specification mentions hard drives. It wouldn't be that efficient, but still better than FAT. There only problem is that there aren't good tools for handling UDF on hard drives.

 

[Squidge]

Seriously, just fu^H^Hignore them. If there is a problem, ship Pandoras without operating system and let the users to install it themselves.

Even without an OS, they still need a FAT & SD license. Part of Pandoras unbrickable nature is the ability to read an SD card formatted as FAT and recover the system even if the internal nand is completely blank (the code is stored in ROM). It's not practical to remove this failsafe and expect everyone to upload a suitable bootloader via a serial link so they can install an OS.

Is this M$ way to stifle Linux?

The MS way is to sell there products. Linux is becoming a big problem for them with more and more companies using Linux over MS OS's due to it's open source nature and being free. If you don't buy there OS, they'll try and get money out of you some other way, like via patents.

I wonder how much the FAT patent costs to license compared to the mobile version of there OS's? If it's similar, some companies might find it easier to just drop Linux and use Windows instead.

 

[WizardStan]

How difficult would it be to create a Windows program that would "prepare" an SD card (ie, format to EXT3) and act as the gateway to copy things on and off said card?

 

[Monk]

Or... can we get a small program that will write a boot image to an SD card which will then fix a "bricked" Pandora? It does not seem necessary, to me, to get Windows to support a new file system if the contents of the SD card remain unchanged. Or would there be problems relating to SD card size (e.g. would we always need to use a 1GB SD card or some such in order for the image to work).

Just throwing it out there - personally I think supporting FAT on the Pandora is important (easy compatability with Windoze, cameras, etc) but options are good.

 

[hedwards]

copyright or trademark laws are not involved, patent law is (3 patents listed under the link I provided). Because the patents were already granted, the claim that the ideas covered are not patentable would have to be defended in court, which of course takes lots of time and money. "even is they would try to sue OP they would epically fail" - I take you actually read these patents and can assure easy success claiming they are invalid? You should have told so TomTom, surely they did not know it.

That is true, but in order to enforce them MS would have to take the party to court. Which is the crux of the problem, if the patents weren't enforceable, then they'd lose the patent. But if they didn't take them to court they'd not be able to enforce them either.

That's not to say that for a small project like this one that going to court hoping for a better outcome is a good idea, but just that arguing that the existence of unenforceable patents is necessarily problematic is kind of silly.

Besides, while I'm not familiar with the implementation of the FAT filesystems in Linux, I'm not necessarily sure that they can be enforced. I believe that reverse engineering them is legitimate providing that it is done in an approved way. Mainly because software patents don't generally get disclosed the way that other types are. Any other type of patent which was handled like that would be a blatant violation of the relevant rules of patenting things.

 

[sindbad]

Besides, while I'm not familiar with the implementation of the FAT filesystems in Linux, I'm not necessarily sure that they can be enforced. I believe that reverse engineering them is legitimate providing that it is done in an approved way. Mainly because software patents don't generally get disclosed the way that other types are. Any other type of patent which was handled like that would be a blatant violation of the relevant rules of patenting things.
The patents deal with handling of long filenames in FAT by using half of the available subdirectories in each directory and some other detail which I forget. Quite silly. And ironic, to patent their fix to a crippled fs.

 

[hedwards]

The patents deal with handling of long filenames in FAT by using half of the available subdirectories in each directory and some other detail which I forget. Quite silly. And ironic, to patent their fix to a crippled fs.

Ah, although it seems weird to even bother, when NTFS is really the filesystem of interoperability these days. Surpassing FAT in every conceivable way.

From the sound of it, it doesn't sound like it stands up to theCODE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilski
decision on patents that was just finalized.

 

[daeglin]

Seriously, just fu^H^Hignore them. If there is a problem, ship Pandoras without operating system and let the users to install it themselves.

Even without an OS, they still need a FAT & SD license. Part of Pandoras unbrickable nature is the ability to read an SD card formatted as FAT and recover the system even if the internal nand is completely blank (the code is stored in ROM).

Thank you for the clarification. AFAIK the FAT patents for which TomTom was sued relate only to handling long filenames. I suppose that the Pandora boot-loader (or OS or whatever is installed in this unbrick mode) could be installed entirely from files with 8+3 character filenames.

I still believe it it not a good strategy to actively search for every possible patent that covers Pandora. Every device crosses thousands and thousand technically invalid and/or stupid patents. There is no way all of them could be licensed before the device comes out.

 

[truekaiser]

the only thing that might happen is they will have to ship the pandora with fat & fat32 support not compiled in the kernel, like *buntu, debain, fedora, and free versions of mandravia linux will probably do.

and what if you want to add vfat to Pandora using SD card? You record source/package/whatever on the card, put it in the Pandora and ... oops, filesystem not recognized.


as of writing this post the following file systems are supported by linux(i am possibly missing a few).

ext2, ext3, ext4, jfs, xfs, reisferfs3, reiserfs4, ocfs2, adfs, amiga ffs, hfs, hfs+, befs(read only), ntfs(safe:read only, experemental: full read & write), bfs, efs, jffs2, cramfs, squashfs, freevxfs, minix file system, sonic blue mpeg fs, os/2 hpfs, qnx4(read only), romfs, sysVfs, and Ufs, nfs.

Now it's not reasonable to expect the angstrom to support all of those filesystems, though like all other distro's the minimum supported file systems is as follows.
ext2, ext3, reiserfs3, xfs, and maybe jfs along with the afor mentioned fat & fat32. assuming your running windows your limited to only fat32 and ntfs. It will only be you that is out of luck, as for me it's a simple
CODE
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mmcblkop1

and the system should be able to read it JUST FINE.

 

[Chip]

It will only be you that is out of luck, as for me it's a simple
It's not just Windows PCs that are out of luck. An SD card formatted with anything other than FAT16/32 will be unreadable by every SD-capable consumer electronics device ever made. That's all digital cameras, cell phones, PMPs, PDAs, GPS units, in-dash MP3 players, digital photo frames, etc. They all only recognize the FAT file system and none of them can easily be upgraded to read something else. Formatting your SD card makes it essentially "Pandora-only".

 

[MDave]

I should be ok with keeping my SD card in FAT format?

Actually, I have another question, hope it doesn't derail the thread:

I should be able to put any .pnd files anywhere on the SD card and the Pandora will search for all available pnd files on there, right? Doesn't matter what format the SD card is in for that? Would seek times be much faster if there was a recommended folder/directory to read .pnd files from, as an option? Doesn't linux based OS's require storage devices to be set up in a specific way and formatting? End of Derail.

 

[Bronek]

That is true, but in order to enforce them MS would have to take the party to court. Which is the crux of the problem, if the patents weren"t enforceable, then they"d lose the patent.

Patents 5,579,517 and 5,758,352 were already re-examined and upheld (decision ruled by USPTO in Jan 2006 - search archives). It would be really, really difficult to overturn them now. Still, these patents only describe the method to store long filenames, perhaps we can do without this feature.

Besides, while I"m not familiar with the implementation of the FAT filesystems in Linux, I"m not necessarily sure that they can be enforced. I believe that reverse engineering them is legitimate providing that it is done in an approved way.

You seem to confuse copyright with patent law. The former applies to code, whilst the later to the format (in this case).

EDIT: added clarification

 

[truekaiser]

It will only be you that is out of luck, as for me it's a simple
It's not just Windows PCs that are out of luck. An SD card formatted with anything other than FAT16/32 will be unreadable by every SD-capable consumer electronics device ever made. That's all digital cameras, cell phones, PMPs, PDAs, GPS units, in-dash MP3 players, digital photo frames, etc. They all only recognize the FAT file system and none of them can easily be upgraded to read something else. Formatting your SD card makes it essentially "Pandora-only".
1. it won't be pandora only as per any pc that can read those file systems will see them.
2. people here splurged for a $300+ i think they would have the cash to spare for more sd cards so they don't have to use one in multiple devices.
3. it's the only way your going to get around the fat licensing like it or not.