MS FAT patent invalidated

[mobrien_12]

Groklaw Story

Well the MS FAT patent has been overturned thanks to the public patent foundation

Fricken Sweet.

FAT is not that great of a filesystem, but it has become a de-facto standard for cross-platform removable media including (for example) floppy disks, zip disks, flash drives, MP3 players, and some digital cameras. While it's not great, it's also not too bad for these limited appications.

This means that MS won't be able to use it's patent to lock out interoperability with open source projects.

[WMD]

OH YES! \o/  

This is good for two reasons:

1.  Didn't DEC or Gary Kidall make FAT anyway?
2.  FAT is 20+ years old.  Make money off something newer.

[WMD]

quote:Originally posted by WMD:
1.  Didn't DEC or Gary Kidall make FAT anyway?

Take that back.  They didn't.  MS was really patenting the (kludgey) method of using long file names in FAT, and decided it was enough to control who could use the file system.

[hm_murdock]

This is something I'm glad they lost. They actually had plans to fuxor things up for everybody.

[TB]

I just hope that the other 3000 or so patent applications filed by M$ this year also get rejected. Is it really that difficult for the patent office to tell M$ that most of their applications are BS?