451 Group: Microsoft suing TomTom, not Linux, not open source

Posted Feb 27, 2009 16:27 UTC (Fri) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770)
Parent article: 451 Group: Microsoft suing TomTom, not Linux, not open source

I love the fact that the valuable Microsoft innovation they're protecting here is the use of the ~ character to paper over the fact that the FAT filesystem has to be able to represent long filenames in the 8.3 scheme.

The headline should be "Microsoft uses patent threat against Linux kernel to try to prevent interoperability".

451 Group: Microsoft suing TomTom, not Linux, not open source

Posted Feb 27, 2009 21:07 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I wonder if it's possible to make a patent free VFAT implementation that never creates legacy entries. Who really cares about DOS now? It's not like users are likely to access their SD cards in DOS.

Sure, it would be better to defeat Microsoft, but having a fallback solution could be useful. Other hardware manufacturers would be more at ease using a patent-free implementation.