FAT Patent Review May Threaten Linux Foundation
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The open-source community has an enormous interest in the outcome of last week's decision by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine the patent Microsoft holds on the FAT file system, a format used for the interchange of media between computers and digital devices.
"The FAT filesystem was not first developed by Microsoft in 1976. It was developed by Seattle Computer Products in around 1979. In 1980, Microsoft licencedsome rights to the QDOS operating system from Seattle Computer Products, and distributed the rebranded QDOS as MSDOS. In 1976, Microsoft was (at best) distributing their BASIC language on paper tape; Digital Research's CP/M operating system was the Disk OS, and it used a filesystem designed, built and owned by them," one reader told eWeek.
The FAT file system is also used by some open-source software to let Linux and Unix computers exchange data with Windows computers, and by Linux itself to read and write files on Windows hard drives.
Some in the open-source community, like Eben Moglen, who is a Columbia University law professor, the general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and a board member of the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat), are worried that Microsoft could in the future decide to allege that Linux infringes on those patents and seek a royalty.
"If Microsoft successfully commercializes its six FAT patents—we attacked the oldest and narrowest one of them—as it is trying to do with hardware manufacturers like those of flash cards and digital cameras that format such file systems manufacturers, then it could be possible for Microsoft to argue that anybody using a free software system that reads and writes to the MS DOS FAT file system also has to pay a royalty. Everyone has grown accustomed to using those file systems on low-density removable media," Moglen said.
PubPat had challenged the patent validity to ensure that such an attack on the ability of the Linux kernel and other free software kernels to do such a familiar thing would not be brought into question at a later time, Moglen said.
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