Ouch!

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 15:11, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Wed, 11 Jan 2006, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>... My guess is that this particular patent is just to increase the
> >># of patents that M$ currently holds - and that is all that is
> >>needed.
> > 
> > 
> > i'm not sure i agree.  as a previous poster mentioned, a patent on
> > the long names featurs of FAT has the potential to impact a lot of
> > handheld/digital/personal devices -- PDAs, digital cameras, etc.
> 
> Especially since MicroSoft gives the terms of the license, I
> believe that they intend to enforce their patents, and make
> some money doing so.

This could be a good thing.  It will get many of those companies to use
an unencumbered file system format on such devices.  Which should force
support of those file systems into Windows....