Panasonic has agreed to license both the new file naming technology and the older FAT32.
Looks like Microsoft will continue to reap patent licensing fees from many a flash-storage device maker (a sore issue for the Linux community). Panasonic has entered into a licensing agreement for Microsoft’s Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology. The agreement, announced Thursday, also grants Panasonic a patent license for the older FAT32 long file name technology. The upshot is: Panasonic doesn’t want to be another TomTom.
This is Microsoft’s second patent licensing coup of the month. The first was the controversial agreement with Amazon in which Amazon licensed a broad range of technologies from Redmond to shield its Kindle e-reader against the company’s legal claws. That agreement included a protection from lawsuits stemming from Microsoft’s infamous claims that Linux violates its patents.
Panasonic’s agreement for exFAT is less in-the-face to the Linux community, but has some interesting implications. The previous version of FAT was, in part, the subject of a lawsuit brought by Microsoft against TomTom, which caused a stir beyond ordinary patent litigation because three of Microsoft’s patents named in the suit also touched on areas covered by the GPLv2 on Linux. That became the first time that Microsoft challenged Linux over patents.
TomTom agreed to remove from its products the functionality related to Microsoft’s File Allocation Table/Long File Name (FAT LFN) patents, which enables efficient naming, organizing, storing and accessing of file data. TomTom will pull that functionality by 2011 and Microsoft also tossed in an agreement that it wouldn’t sue TomTom’s end customers over the issue. The implication is that TomTom will be replacing the long file name support with a different, non-Microsoft, technology.
TomTom’s legal woes with Microsoft caused the Linux Foundation to shortly thereafter declares war on the Windows FAT file system. Funny thing is, even though Microsoft moved away from FAT years ago (in favor of NTFS), tons of devices still use FAT. These include USB flash drives and memory cards in devices like cell phones, cameras, MP3 players. Linux operating systems that don’t support FAT would become inoperable with FAT-based devices. The Linux Foundation began pushing distro makers to drop FAT support and stick with the open source Linux file systems such as ext3, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS. It wanted to get device makers on board with the plan, too.
But device makers that don’t support Windows file technologies would have to be content to abandon Windows as well. How likely is that? With Windows 7 hot as ever, Panasonic’s announcement today proves that it is not at all likely.
exFAT is an improvement on FAT, and was introduced by Microsoft specifically for embedded devices in Windows Embedded CE 6.0 in 2006. The file system allows file sizes beyond 4 GBytes, the upper limit for FAT32. It also supports more files in each directory, access control lists and offers other improvements over FAT.
The Linux community won’t necessarily be out in the cold. Last summer, Tuxera, the Finnish company that created an open source driver for Microsoft NTFS (the NTFS-3G), entered into an agreement with Microsoft for exFAT so that it could create a Linux driver for it, too. Microsoft was more than happy to oblige.
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