[En-Nut-Discussion] Phat Formatting

[Alain M.]

Eric Haver escreveu:
> Gruss Harald,
> I am a native English speaker, and I had great trouble reading it, also.

:) it is really confusing.

But ...
1) The licence bellow is about the specifications document
2) there is suposed to be (sorry I don't have the link) a PATENT on the 
FAT32 format, wich is another monster by it's own.

I found this from FreeDOS:

Two FreeDOS resources about the patents:
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/press/2006-fat.html
* U.S. Patent #5,579,517  Common name space for long and short filenames
* U.S. Patent #5,758,352 Common name space for long and short filenames
* U.S. Patent #6,286,013 Method and system for providing a common name
   space for long and short file names in an operating system
http://fd-doc.sourceforge.net/faq/cgi-bin/viewfaq.cgi?faq=General_Information/160
(note: do you know what that spam means? some code or just gibberish?)

But maybe the pattent is only for Long File Names...

Alain



> 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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>>
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