From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mark Williamson Subject: Re: Replacing VFAT as filesystem on removeable media Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:53:12 +0100 Message-ID: <200903311653.14500.mark.williamson@cl.cam.ac.uk> References: <200903311015.29222.Martin@Lichtvoll.de> <200903311602.41272.mark.williamson@cl.cam.ac.uk> <1238512897.27596.579.camel@skunk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-6" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Martin Steigerwald , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, info@fsf.org, office@fsfeurope.org, info@linuxfoundation.org To: Xavier Bestel Return-path: Received: from ppsw-7.csi.cam.ac.uk ([131.111.8.137]:53323 "EHLO ppsw-7.csi.cam.ac.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753004AbZCaPxV (ORCPT ); Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:53:21 -0400 In-Reply-To: <1238512897.27596.579.camel@skunk> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Tuesday 31 March 2009 16:21:37 Xavier Bestel wrote: > I'm speaking out of my ass here, but seeing how Microsoft managed to > sneak some patents into something as trivial as FAT, I'm pretty sure MTP > is a hell of a minefield. That did occur to me too but I was somewhat hopeful that perhaps this would be mitigated by the (eventual?) adoption as a usb.org standard. The spec and an adopters' legal agreement around it is here: http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/MTP_1.0.zip I scanned the agreement and it didn't look like it was obviously evil but I'm not really qualified to make that judgement ;-) It had some promising words in it like "zero royalty" but I would be much happier if someone with legal knowhow (and preferably experience of the usb.org standards procedures) decoded it for me / us! Assuming the spec is legally "safe" to implement, I would have thought it would be generally beneficial for device manufacturers to support both "initiator" and "responder" endpoints under Linux. Cheers, Mark