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It seems that Microsoft has put a tax for any product that is formatted with FAT filesystem by the manufacturer... if this is the present, what will reserve the future? Maybe tomorrow also our little OS should pay a license for using a filesystem?!
I think Microsoft is following a very stupid philosophy... ideas and scientific discoveries should have no price! >:(

The original article can be found here http://slashdot.org/articles/03/12/04/1318212.shtml?tid=109

ideas and scientific discoveries should have no price!

That's how Jean-Luc Picard would see it, too.

Don't blame Microsoft. They're a company, and a company is for making profit. They're good at that, you'll have to agree.

Blame the US patent laws for enabling companies to patent such silly and base things as FAT, and for allowing those patents to be still valid over 25 years after they were files.

Blame the world economy for actually placing software companies in the EU and elsewhere at a real competitive disadvantage - you can't patent such silly stuff over here, but patents like that are a currency among US companies that's just as good as dollars or euros.

Blame the EU politicians, who - instead of pressurizing the US patent law to be reworked - fully intend to invent the same system here, because they think it would benefit the software companies here.

To blame Microsoft is easy, but never the solution.

drizzt wrote:ideas and scientific discoveries should have no price! >:(

If you can persuade scientists and engineers to work for you for no money, then that's great. However, companies who do come up with new inventions and designs need to make money somehow, and if they're not making a physical product (e.g. they are writing software) they'll need to charge licensing fees.

so the FLASH manufacturers will simply deliver non-formatted device ... where's the problem ? Okay, that's boring because you can't just 'put your card in your camera and go for getting pictures': you first need to format the card using a PC or something alike . Blah. Those who care will have to buy more expensive cards. the others will buy cheap cards and format them ...

Ok I don't want to blame Microsoft more than others, nor I'd want to instigate flame-wars ;D

I think only with a brain of a boy that make programs exclusively for passion and I don't claim to understand the reasons of the commercial choices done by a big company as Microsoft.

Thinking in this terms, the wild war for copyrights seems to me simply a useless loss of time...

Tim Robinson wrote:

drizzt wrote:ideas and scientific discoveries should have no price! >:(

If you can persuade scientists and engineers to work for you for no money, then that's great. However, companies who do come up with new inventions and designs need to make money somehow, and if they're not making a physical product (e.g. they are writing software) they'll need to charge licensing fees.

Tim, this is very true. But the company we're speaking has notable incomes, realized by selling many products. Remember that linux&co. are only a minority part of the market. It could be justified to charge licenses for new discoveries (in this case e.g. NTFS) and not for base products at this time (e.g. FAT). Doing so who makes software could be also enlived to produce new things.... but probably my ideas can works only in a perfect world...

so the FLASH manufacturers will simply deliver non-formatted device ... where's the problem ? Okay, that's boring because you can't just 'put your card in your camera and go for getting pictures': you first need to format the card using a PC or something alike . Blah. Those who care will have to buy more expensive cards. the others will buy cheap cards and format them ...

Well... my trouble is that if today there is only a license for the manufacter, tomorrow there'll be a license also for the user... for now I'll format my storage devices... ;D eh eh