Microsoft's Perspective [LWN.net]

Microsoft's Perspective

Posted Mar 3, 2009 10:50 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
Parent article: Third time is the charm?

Excellent article. This sort of thing is why I subscribe to LWN.

And now, I'll do something I've probably never done before, try to write how things might look from Microsoft's perspective.

Microsoft licenses its FAT patents to probably pretty much all corporations that want FAT compatibility, which (sadly) is a quite a large group due to FAT being commonplace.

So, to Microsoft, TomTom is the odd company out, a strange corporation that won't license its FAT patents. It's possible the Microsoft lawyers couldn't care less what OS TomTom runs (or perhaps don't even understand much about OSes) - to them, TomTom is just another company, that 'should' license the patents just like everyone else. Or, perhaps the Microsoft lawyers are aware of Linux being in the picture here, but think, why should we give a free pass to TomTom just because they happen to run Linux?

So, I'm not terribly surprised Microsoft decided to sue. The problem is the US patent system, and corporations that support and utilize it, like Microsoft.

Overall, I think the lawsuit shows Microsoft is not willing to give Linux a pass, which is a bad sign - but not as bad as a direct and all-out attack. Or, if this is an all-out attack, and FAT patents are the worst Microsoft has to hold over our heads, then I'm pretty relieved, all things considered.

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Microsoft's Perspective

Posted Mar 3, 2009 11:37 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

There is a point that I would have liked to see in the article, and which relates to your post. It can be summarized by the following questions. Is Microsoft risking a countersuit by OIN at all? Is TomTom a member of OIN, or can it become one? Is there a generic provision for software covered by OIN, even if it is used by non-members? I'm thinking something like SCO frightening Red Hat users, and Red Hat retaliating with a suit. Can there be something like that for generic Linux kernel developers / distributors / users, but from OIN? Are there other similar organizations which could enter the picture to help TomTom defend against these stupid patents?

I gather the question to all of them is 'no', but there probably should be something along these lines. Otherwise thousands of companies are open to stupid lawsuits from patent-bullies (of which Microsoft has definitely become one).

Microsoft's Perspective

Posted Mar 3, 2009 18:15 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Does Microsoft actually license their VFAT patents to all that many small embedded device manufacturers? Most pairs of large companies license each other all their patents in bulk without regard for any specific patent (because caring about specific patents would lead quickly to lengthy and expensive negotiations). For companies that Microsoft doesn't have a cross-licensing agreement with, I'd guess that a lot of them either don't write to VFAT at all or don't write to files with long filenames, because it costs an extra sector write against your file creation performance and you don't generally have useful names to give files anyway. (As far as I can tell, my camera's only able to set up a particular fixed empty directory layout if it doesn't already exist and create files of the form "dscnXXXX.jpg", and I would guess that they have a cross-licensing agreement and still avoid the VFAT hack.) So I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't anybody who's specifically licensed this patent.