Microsoft wants its FAT back

Ars Technica reported on a recent lawsuit filed by Microsoft against the GPS maker, TomTom. What’s interesting is the potential ground this lawsuit may cover, including Microsoft’s FAT filesystem. FAT is well documented, runs on any version of Windows and almost universally on Linux and Apple operating systems. This universal OS support makes it an attractive candidate for mobile storage media such as digital camera memory cards, MP3 players, phones, GPS units, etc. Although Microsoft mostly disregarded FAT as a hard disk filesystem for it’s desktop/server operating systems in favor of it’s newer NTFS filesystem, FAT is still widely used today throughout the entire industry outside of Microsoft itself. A copyright lawsuit against TomTom for the use of FAT could create an enormous ripple in the computing industry that relies so heavily on it’s use. Read the rest of this entry »