Microsoft ♥ Linux – we say that a lot, and we mean it! Today we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft is supporting the addition of Microsoft’s exFAT technology to the Linux kernel.
[…]It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
Microsoft has been using its exFAT patents to bat Linux companies over the head with for close to two decades, and it was an important pillar of Microsoft’s strategy of extracting patent licensing fees from all kinds of entities using Linux. Seeing this finally come to a complete and non-negotiable end is a sight to behold, but it does make me wonder – was it really all necessary? Was it worth it?
It seems like to me it really wasn’t – in fact, it’s been a catastrophic failure. Linux is now the single most popular operating system in the world, shipping on more devices and hardware than any other. No amount of silly troll patents were going to stop that.
Going after Linux was the Ballmernator who wanted to be a rip off of Apple, now its run by Nutella who wants to be a rip off of Google and therefor doesn’t give a crap about going after Linux as he’s too busy trying to beat Google in the data slurping dept.
For Microsoft the practice was a success. It retained Windows as the dominant desktop OS with little/no competition.
Modern Microsoft now understands cloud services can bring in as much revenue, and give as much power as running the desktop did. Because of where the technology investment has been, Linux is at the core of this strategy. If Microsoft wants to succeed in the Cloud, it needs to direct where Linux goes too.
I would prefer f2fs support in Windows 10.
You and me both. It’s time to move on from FAT/exFAT and use F2FS for things like SD cards and flash drives.
Since we’re compiling a wish list of things we’d like…
– Universal disk encryption standard, or LUKS support in everything.
– Ext4 support in MacOS and Windows.
– UFS support in Linux, MacOS, and Windows.
– APFS support in Linux and the BSDs.
Flatland_Spider,
Don’t forget LVM! There have been so many times I’ve installed windows wishing I could install alongside linux inside a dynamically managed and thin provisioned LVM volume.
I don’t know what good it will bring. All I know is that Linux is well and happy for now. Sure there are the ocational twists and stuff. Yet it is going pretty well I would say. exFAT or Fat32 for USB stick’s? Well…. Fat32 have been used for god knows how long on USB storage. And to be honest. I really don’t see exFAT replacing Fat32 for a good long time. I use Linux as my primaery OS at home, on my daily driver, and to be honest, I really do not care what file system I am running on it. It is one of them journalised ones, that so many Ubuntu Mate user are running as default. And it is working well for me. I have no interest in knowing what it is, because it is just working. All I know about it, is that it is not any MS file system that I am using.
Now that it’s open I suspect it will overtake FAT32 pretty quickly on external storage, at least for the good brands. It’s already the official standard for high-capacity SD cards, and it has a number of significant technical advantages over FAT32. In particular, it can handle filesystems larger than 2TB without needing large sectors on-disk, and files larger than 4GB, which is huge (no pun intended) for some use cases.
On top of all that, if they’re opening up all the patents relating to it (I didn’t see for certain if this is the case or not), then it should show some measurable performance improvements over FAT32.
exFat has already taken over for for Fat32. Windows and MacOS have natively supported exFat for a long time, and it has technical advantages over Fat32 beyond partition and single file size. ie. It’s not waiting to self-destruct.
Let’s get 1 thing straight. This has nothing to do with silly patent trolling. Microsoft developed exFAT, offered licensing for it and lots of companies wanted/needed to support exFAT. Microsoft clearly made their money back dozens of times so exFat has been a great success for Microsoft both in user adoption and financially. Now, for reasons of goodwill/convenience or other, Microsoft has decided to give their tech+patent away. Isn’t this actually a great example of how patents should work?
Also: no, exFAT was in no way so important that we need to start a whole discussion about Microsoft being evil and abusing a monopoly. exFAT was mainly used in mobile devices with removable storage, not for servers or desktops
avgalen,
No, because those of us who don’t believe software patents should be granted at all sees the very fact that they were able to get a patent for parts of it is wrong.
The main role of patents was to get people to stop hoarding their knowledge so that society may progress. Software patents do not progress society but holds it back, because they wall off trivial things.
Guess what operating system is used in popular mobile devices? Getting into the mobile space obviously isn’t easy, but it isn’t helped if a startup would be forced to pay for software patent licences (because they should not have been granted) just to interoperate with other mobile devices.
If you care about competition in markets, you cannot support barriers to interoperability.
* Disclaimer: I can say from first hand experience of reviewing software patents and the process of getting one that there isn’t much worth to them except to deprive the market of competition.
kwan_e,
Exactly, the intention of patents in the constitution was to disclose and disseminate new information to the public in exchange for a temporary monopoly. The opposite is a trade secret.
This model has never worked great for software because lets face it patent filings themselves are garbage as a practical source of software information. Patents are obfuscated by lawyers for lawyers. They wouldn’t even be worth the paper they’re written on if it weren’t for the artificial government monopoly status. In court they provide legal ammunition for the businesses that own them, but in terms of software documentation they are so useless we could burn em all up and software developers would give zero craps.
Yeah, the more one learns about software patents, the less morally justifiable they are. People say, oh it’s just a problem with “patent trolls”. But logically the only reason a defensive patent ever becomes useful is to rectify the problem of offensive patents. Think about it, offensive patents are an integral part of the patent system since if no one could use patents to go trolling for lawsuits, no one would need patents to defend against the patent trolls in the first place.
That’s true, this has become their raison d’être.
Yeah, they really should include source code of a comprehensive reference implementation in addition to the description.
I completely agree that source code of a comprehensive reference implementation should be included to get a patent. Just like it isn’t enough to just say “book about guy with sharp teeth that likes blood and hates crosses, garlic and daylight” to get a copyright. And I agree in general that software patents are horrible.
However, this is what we are talking about:
Under Article I, section 8, it reads, “Congress shall have power… to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
And that is exactly what happened to exFAT. For a limited time Microsoft benefitted from the work they put into exFAT which was clearly useful to other companies and to people using removable storage. And now they are opening up the entire technology so other companies and people can use exFAT for free and even improve on it if they want.
TLDR: Software patents in general: Bad, exFAT: exactly what patents were meant to accomplish. Of course it would have been even better if exFAT had been entirely open from the beginning but that is a different discussion
avgalen,
No it didn’t.
It did NOTHING to promote the progress of science and useful arts. It set it back.
@kwan_e
Science and useful arts… pfft… have you seen the bags of money lobbyists give to politicians? They are huge! Software patents are not fair, which is why they are an exception happening in very few countries. Most countries do NOT have software patents, since patenting abstract concepts runs contrary to the very nature of what patents are for, making software patents a ridiculous concept to begin with. Not that this prevents lobbyists for trying to pass them in the EU in every opportunity.
avgalen,
What you are missing though is that file systems will evolve out of necessity regardless. The need & motivation for new file systems has nothing whatsoever to do with software patents. Sure, companies like microsoft will take advantage of them to combat competition and charge royalties, but realistically software patents don’t deserve any credit for something that was already destined to happen. Even without the patent system, microsoft would have needed overcome the limits of FAT32 anyways. The monopoly incentives provided by patents are completely unneeded in this case (and in many other cases too), the software industry is incurring the burden of software patents (and there are many) without seeing much actual benefit.
We don’t even need to speak hypothetically about this since the software industry even microsoft itself established itself well before software patents entered the big picture. Even the FAT file system was developed without patent protection. If you want to argue they’re necessary for file systems today, I’m not buying that. Software patents create monopolies on new innovation, but it’s quite apparent to most of us in the industry that they are rarely responsible for creating the new innovation that they grant monopolies to.
There are so many bad patents to choose from, just for kicks I’m going to throw in a funny one…
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2178-boy-takes-swing-at-us-patents/
Haha, this one is quite preposterous both for the method of playing on a swing as well as the fact that many of us were doing that before he was even born. But in many ways it symbolizes the problems we have with software patents too. To a software developer, software patents are equally ridiculous because to us one cannot morally justify ownership of code patterns that are a natural byproduct of what we do when we program software. It’s a common refrain by now, but it needs to be stated that software needs to be protected by copyrights and not patents!
there isn’t much worth to them except to deprive the market of competition.
This really needs to be emphasized. Software patents favor large businesses who can pay for lawyers.
Meanwhile in the real world everyone who gets a usb stick etc starts by formating it to NTFS which works fine on everything these days.
Too little too late.
I always thought exfat was meant to be free anyway to stop the licencing needs of fat(32/16/12). Still see above.
exFAT was never free, quite the opposite. It was Microsoft saying “if you want files bigger than 4GB in your MicroSD cards you ‘d better support exFAT, because other than NTFS and exFAT our OS won’t support any other filesystem out of the box”.
This is common practice among big companies. They basically walk into the standards committee and say: “Add this and that patented feature in your technical standard otherwise our products won’t elect to support it.” It’s why companies like Microsoft and Apple got so annoyed by WebM. Microsoft and Apple were used into bullying ITU into developing video formats that specifically step on their patents, even for minor or questionable features, and suddenly a truly open standard which was designed to NOT step on Microsoft’s and Apple’s patents is gaining traction.
kurkosdr,
When I was doing windows kernel development in XP this is what I was working on until microsoft abruptly pulled our ability to develop drivers on our own computers without a corporate code certificate. Many open source alternatives to MS file systems have suffered as a result, ironically this self imposed brain-drain only resulted in windows file systems falling behind.
That’s corruption for you, unfortunately it’s very effective at controlling the direction of technology. It gives incumbents a great deal of control over the market. At least on windows you were free to install 3rd party codecs, a better media player, and alternative browsers. However apple’s policy of banning users from installing alternative browsers and codecs on IOS did a great deal of harm for mobile.
Which makes me wonder: Why did Microsoft give up all that exFAT licensing revenue? Is it because Android phones are shifting to internal storage and cloud and Microsoft thinks MicroSDs further some goal they have?
Possibly a publicity stunt staged before the patents ran out.
exFAT is a long way from patent expiration. It was released in 2006.
kurkosdr,
Can you find the actual patent numbers? In the US it’s 20 years from the filing date, which may not have anything to do with 2006. Companies are notorious for patenting things that have little to do with their products and treat patents as a commodity. When something like a new FS standard is developed, it can already be protected by pre-existing patents and/or patents they acquired. I don’t know the details in this case, but I wouldn’t automatically assume that 2006 date is the one that counts.
kurkosdr,
With the talk of licensing revenue, what exactly is the licensing profit? How much of the revenue goes back to paying their lawyers, their noncompliance auditing processes, the litigation pocesses, and the infrastructure they need to support all that? All the while having to deal with potential patent action by other companies because the exFAT patents were not in a non-aggression pool?
I think the new Microsoft has rediscovered that the best way to get money is to provide what customers need, rather than trying to find the one thing they can rest their laurels on. Getting distracted by patents and getting even with competitors means they can’t focus on customers business problems.
Nah, I don’t buy it. Microsoft is more than happy to keep licensing their WMV, WMA and ActiveSync Exchange patents. I firmly believe Microsoft thinks they have something to gain from wider adoption of MicroSD cards and removable storage in general, and they correctly identified the encumbered nature of exFAT (which resulted in FAT32 overstaying its welcome, especially in USB sticks) as a hindrance.
PS: Due to the nature of FAT32 encumbered-ness (basically only apps and OSes using VFAT were stepping on any Microsoft patents, which all have expired btw), USB and MicroSD hardware vendors could always use FAT32 without having to pay anyone anything.
kurkosdr,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1#Legal_status
That’s because their codecs depend on a lot of other patented things. They can’t open something they don’t have the patents for.
What don’t you buy? Everything else you said I already said – there are gains for Microsoft for opening up exFAT.
I think that is exactly the reason. None of the devices I control will ever use any form of FAT or NTFS. Moreover most people around me are fine with internal storage, which is usually ext4 or whatever filesystem iOS uses internally.
Microsoft is getting desperate to keep its foot in de door and failing. This whole announcement looks like a non-event to me unless it was done for publicity to convince people how good citizens they are. Sorry, but I don’t believe anything Microsoft says or does.
exFAT already works in Linux with the fuse driver, so not sure why it needs to be in the kernel. Also, FAT32 is by far the most universally supported filesystem, sith support in FreeMiNT, AmigaOS, etc. Most FPGA computers will read FAT32 as well, none of them support exFAT.
The idea of putting exFAT in the kernel is that any linux-powered laptop, Android device or even linux-powered Enigma box would “just work” with exFAT removable storage. Aka manufacturers can distribute linux generic kernel and they will be automatically distributing exFAT support, no need to run for drivers and licensing the drivers with Microsoft etcetera
People, *NOTHING* is going to change here for a very important reason.
Compatibility.
Exfat isn’t compatible with a lot of devices/equipment like digital cameras especially older models and most sane people aren’t about to throw them out despite what some losers here might think because of this.
yoko-t,
Thinking things through is not your strong-suit, is it?
“kwan_e
yoko-t,
Thinking things through is not your strong-suit, is it?”
What do you mean dolt?? You can’t *USE* Exfat with these devices,though someone like you would try to,and then complain about the fact that you couldn’t