well, i suppose we all saw this coming.

they want their quarter mil out of Apple, Diamond, Cannon, Samsung, Olympus, Phillips, SanDisk, Viking, etc, etc. etc.

my initial reaction was to flip out over this, but decided to do some research on the licenses for, say, HFS+, to make sure i'm not being unfair to microsoft. well, it turns out that apple's HFS+ implementation was made available under their APSL as part of the Darwin core. APSL looks to be fairly commercial friendly though IANAL... even so, Microsoft isn't likely to write a filesystem driver for HFS+ and then make the code available to the public as the APSL requires. I couln't find any details on commercial, proprietary licences.

FAT File System Technology and Patent License