[En-Nut-Discussion] Phat Formatting

[Eric Haver]

Gruss Harald,
I am a native English speaker, and I had great trouble reading it, also.
From:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx

Basically it looks to me that if you download and use  FATGEN103.doc, the
specs for FAT32,  you will hold Microsoft blameless for any problems it
causes, or inaccuracies contained.

There is no mention of paying a fee for using it. they do mention that if
you sue them, you can not get more than $5.00.

Here are some ausschnitte:

1. LIMITED LICENSE AND COVENANT NOT TO SUE.

(a) Provided that you comply with all terms and conditions of this Agreement
and subject to the limitations in Sections 1(c) - (f) below, Microsoft
grants to you the following non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free,
non-transferable, non-sublicenseable license under any copyrights owned or
licensable by Microsoft without payment of consideration to unaffiliated
third parties, to reproduce the Specification solely for the purposes of
creating portions of products which comply with the Specification in
unmodified form.

The paragraph for us, is 1(e):
(e) Each of the license and the covenant not to sue described above shall
not extend to your use of any portion of the Specification for any purpose
other than (a) to create portions of an operating system (i) only as
necessary to adapt such operating system so that it can directly interact
with a firmware implementation of the Extensible Firmware Initiative
Specification v. 1.0 ("EFI Specification"); (ii) only as necessary to
emulate an implementation of the EFI Specification; and (b) to create
firmware, applications, utilities and/or drivers that will be used and/or
licensed for only the following purposes: (i) to install, repair and
maintain hardware, firmware and portions of operating system software which
are utilized in the boot process; (ii) to provide to an operating system
runtime services that are specified in the EFI Specification; (iii) to
diagnose and correct failures in the hardware, firmware or operating system
software; (iv) to query for identification of a computer system (whether by
serial numbers, asset tags, user or otherwise); (v) to perform inventory of
a computer system; and (vi) to manufacture, install and setup any hardware,
firmware or operating system software.

So, I think there is no problem...

*Eric


On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 3:23 AM, Harald Kipp <harald.kipp at egnite.de> wrote:

> Hi Alain,
>
> Alain M. wrote:
> > I believe that the problem here is the licence. FAT32 is a Microsoft
> > patent, open software can use it, but embedded system cannot format any
> > media... or something close to it, read the licence, it may be more
> > complicated.
>
> Never heard about patent problems specifically with formatting, though
> I'm aware that FAT is not plain sailing. All this license stuff is
> difficult to read for non-native English speakers and I appreciate any
> help on this topic.
>
> The funny thing is, that my PDA running MS WinPPC cannot format SD Cards
> either.
>
> Harald
>
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