Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 23:44:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Arne "Wörner" <arne_woerner@yahoo.com> To: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>, freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: can not mount a large FAT32 filesystem Message-ID: <20050928064434.10409.qmail@web30309.mail.mud.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <433A32AE.1030802@samsco.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Might this be an attempt by the manufacturer to avoid the > potential patent litigation from using msdosfs? I.e. > create a slightly non-conformant filesystem so that it > can't claim to explicitely be msdosfs/vfat/fat32/whatever, > thereby avoiding the patents on those technologies? > Then that software patent idea wouldn't make much sense, because: It wants to protect the complicated "new" ideas and not things "everybody" could do... Furthermore the FAT filesystem is most likely (I never looked at it myself) quite primitive and based on principles, that are quite old and well known in "administration science" (directories, files, names, references, ...), so that there is nothing "new"... > Since these checks are done after other magic number checks, > it's likely safe. > One message in this thread says, that M*cr*s*ft does not use that values anyway (somehow that data field might be "reserved for later use")... I do not know, why that data field was checked by the FreeBSD code... I say, is the content of that data field somewhere explained or specified? -Arne __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20050928064434.10409.qmail>