Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

Posted Jan 11, 2006 17:09 UTC (Wed) by zooko (guest, #2589)
Parent article: Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

Don't forget that patents are of limited duration. FAT itself was invented in the early 80's at the latest, so it cannot be covered by patents.

One news article I saw pointed to a patent that was granted in 1996 about truncating long filenames and putting ~1, ~2, etc. so that you can lookup the files while using an 8.3-limited filesystem. Does Linux even implement that feature?

Yes, Linux implements it

Posted Jan 11, 2006 23:43 UTC (Wed) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link]

Linux reads such filesystems. Its techniques for inventing the names when writing to them are a bit cleverer than Microsoft's.

Perhaps more importantly, a system known as umsdos did pretty much the same thing (metadata in hidden files), starting a fair bit earlier than VFAT ever did. There was a later edition (which never made release) called "UVFAT" which was a UMSDOS-over-VFAT implementation. There are also systems like Rock Ridge and Joliet for doing the same thing on ISO-9660 (CD-R) filesystems. It could also be argued that Apple's filesystems ("DATA fork" and so on) are simply a more generalised form of the same technique.

Only a lawyer could believe that there was anything truly patentable in VFAT.