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UMSDOS and ZipSlackUMSDOS and ZipSlackPosted Dec 9, 2003 10:07 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525)In reply to: UMSDOS and ZipSlack by proski Parent article: Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register)
UMSDOS is either prior art or not affected by the patent, because it's implementation predates the filing of the patent. Other prior art of having long and short filenames together in one directory are the Rock Ridge extensions of the ISO 9660 filesystem (NM record for alternative name). The question still is if the way Microsoft does it is novel and different enough to qualify as innovation. IMHO Rock Ridge is closer to vfat than UMSDOS, which keeps the additional metadata in a file, not within the directory itself.
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UMSDOS and ZipSlack Posted Dec 9, 2003 12:27 UTC (Tue) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link] The idea of UMSDOS is to keep a separate file to tell which 8.3 filename "maps" to the long file name, and to store the uid, gid and umask which is also needed for a Unix-style directory. I don't think it can serve as a prior art of VFAT, which uses directory entries which are interpreted as "deleted" in the old filesystem implementation to hold the long filenames. The former would leave an extra file visible by the old 8.3 filesystem implementation, the latter would not. The former is generic and can be done to any filesystem, the latter is specific to FAT and won't apply to anything else.I think the patent is probably valid (unless the objection that it is filed too late would hold some water). On the other hand, I don't think it really make sense for MS to ripe on it, since it would essentially kill the file format: there are dozens of better filesystem that (1) are free of patent issues, (2) have free implementations, and (3) have better performance than VFAT. Once MS start collecting patent money, vendors will start ditching the format (or fallback to 8.3).
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