well, i suppose we all saw this coming. they want their quarter mil out of Apple, Diamond, Cannon, Samsung, Olympus, Phillips, SanDisk, Viking, etc, etc. etc. my initial reaction was to flip out over this, but decided to do some research on the licenses for, say, HFS+, to make sure i'm not being unfair to microsoft. well, it turns out that apple's HFS+ implementation was made available under their APSL as part of the Darwin core. APSL looks to be fairly commercial friendly though IANAL... even so, Microsoft isn't likely to write a filesystem driver for HFS+ and then make the code available to the public as the APSL requires. I couln't find any details on commercial, proprietary licences. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
I'm sorry... my BS-O-METER is buried in the red. This reminds me of the Unisys claim that they were suddenly owed royalties by every company that sold software supporting .GIF image files a couple years back. There really need to be laws in place that prevent this "patent squatting" from happening. OH SO convenient for a corporation like M$ or Unisys to bite their lip for X number of YEARS until something is adopted as an industry standard... THEN try to claim they are owed royalties by everyone and their mother? NO. You have a patent? Fine - then you best make dilligent efforts to ENFORCE your CLAIM to that patent from the time you apply for it - that means going after companies that adopt your technology and collecting royalties from the get-go. Let it slide for X amount of time without enforcing it? You lose ****ALL**** rights to your patent and it reverts to the public domain without warning. End of story. LB FAT File System Technology and Patent License |
