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exFAT is currently under Patent. Implement it all you want but Samsung pays Microsoft for the right to use it.
by techrat 12y ago
exFAT is currently under Patent. Implement it all you want but Samsung pays Microsoft for the right to use it.
- higherpurpose 12y agoLast I checked reverse engineering without paying licenses was legal. And that's what this open source implementation of exFAT is.
- higherpurpose 12y agoLast I checked reverse engineering without paying licenses was legal. And that's what this open source implementation of exFAT is. As a monopoly on PC's, why is Microsoft allowed to collect royalties on the filesystem anyway? Is there another way to connect external media to a Windows PC without having to pay Microsoft royalties? If there is not, that should be an anti-trust issue.
- overcertified 12y agoFirst, reverse engineering in some cases may violate the DMCA regardless of what you do with the code. If a patent is valid, then reverse engineering doesn't get you anywhere. Patent is not copyright. You can sit down and write your own implementation of the code, not copying anything, and still violate the patent. Most of the people who complain about having to pay for exfat are the open source people who are used to getting what they thought was free software. However with the Heartbleed and shell shock issues this year the crditbity and false notions that open source are free are going down the drain. Meanwhile, Microsoft successful defense of the vfat (long for name in fat32) and mapping parents against Tom Tom has minimized cases where someone goes against those patents and almost all major distributions of Linux will not (and probably can't) add exfat to the distribution. That leaves most using FUSE and there are many complaints over the various forums about issues, bugs, and corruption ISO g the FUSE drivers.