After 2 years of examination the U.S Patent and Trademark Office has reversed its two earlier unofficial decisions and decided that Microsoft's File Allocation Table file system constitutes a "novel and non-obvious" system enabling it to be patented. This coupled with Microsofts plans to charge licensing fees for use of the system could cause many problems for open-source operating systems that implement the file system, or even to mp3 players. Elsewhere, APCMag.com has an interview with Microsoft's "open source point man" Martin Gregory.
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Member since:2006-01-01
The development of a simple filesystem is not difficult. The difficulty is providing interoperability with other systems. FAT has taken on the role that ISO9660 and UDF fill by providing platform-neutral filesysem access for a variety of devices. So you can develop a simple filesystem, and it doesn't decrease the headache for people that can't use it because Windows doesn't ship with support for it. You can write and distribute a version of the filesysem for Windows, but then people have to know enough to need to want to get it.
If Microsoft supported writing to UDF volumes in Windows, that would go a long way toward making this all less important. Considering that FAT is seriously inadequate for large volumes, they should do this anyway.
Member since:
2005-07-06
As has been pointed out DOS/FAT filesytem is a very simple one. If we want to replace it, what is the next simplest filesystem to write to add to alt OSes?
People suggest ext2 and ext3, but are these the simplest filesystems to write that will also do the job, or would developing a still simpler FS be worth while considering?