From: Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@cl.cam.ac.uk>
To: Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>
Subject: Re: Replacing VFAT as filesystem on removeable media
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:53:12 +0100
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Cc: Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de>, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
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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
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