Practical Technology

Microsoft’s decision to sue TomTom — and in the process take on Linux — isn’t likely to affect your use of Linux. As of now, that’s the concensus among experts.

But if Microsoft wants a fight — oh boy, is the open-source community ready for it.

First, it should be noted that Microsoft is claiming its lawsuit, made public this week, isn’t really about Linux or open source. Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing, said that while “three of the infringed patents implicate open-source code…open-source software is not the focal point of this action.”

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What’s what with Microsoft’s patent claims, and a modest suggestion on how to avoid all this patent nonsense now, and in the future: Get the FAT out!

At first glance, Microsoft suing TomTom, the navigation device manufacturer, for patent violations, appeared to be patent business as usual. A closer look at the Microsoft/TomTom lawsuit (PDF Link) showed that three of Microsoft’s eight patents don’t concern navigation systems, but file system usage within TomTom’s Linux-powered devices.

Specifically, Microsoft is claiming that TomTom, and by implication Linux, is in violation of U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517 (“the ’517 patent”l), entitled “Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames;” U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352 (“the ’352 patent”), entitled “Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames;” and U.S. Patent No. 6,256,642 (“the ’642 patent”), entitled “Method and System for File System Management Using a Flash-Erasable, Programmable, Read-only Memory.”

While the names of the first two patents are identical, they actually refer to two different aspects of using ‘long’ file names in file systems. In older, 16-bit Microsoft FAT (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (New Technology File System) file systems supported a maximum of 8 characters for the base file name and 3 characters for the file extension. Including the dot separator, this gave 16-bit systems a maximum of 12-characters for a name. With the advent of 32-bit operating systems, the methods in these patents were introduced to ensure backwards compatibility between MS-DOS, early versions of NT, and Windows 2 and 3.x and later Windows operating systems such as Windows 98. The last patent covers a way to handle these file systems on Flash memory.

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I’ve been talking to a lot of smart people about the Microsoft/TomTom lawsuit. One thing we all pretty much agree on is that this lawsuit doesn’t make a lot of sense.

First, the Linux file system-related patents are, in a word, ‘weak.’ They may have survived PUBPAT’s (Public Patent Foundation) attempt to knock the FAT (File Allocation Table) patents out a few years ago, but Microsoft just squeaked by. No one actually thought that Microsoft would actually try to sue anyone using those patents. It would have been just asking to be smashed as one patent-savvy attorney put it to me.

And, that was before the Bilski decision, which smashed the legal foundations of most business and software patents. So that’s another reason for Microsoft to avoid suing with a weak set of software patents.

Besides, TomTom is a Dutch company. Does Microsoft really want to go to a European court with a sad patent case these days? With the European anti-trust division back on the hunt against them for bundling Internet Explorer!?

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