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Has Microsoft's Patent War Against Linux Begun?
Glyn Moody writes "Microsoft has filed a suit against TomTom, 'alleging that the in-car navigation company's devices violate eight of its patents — including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel.' What's interesting is that the intellectual property lawyer behind the move, Horacio Gutierrez, has just been promoted to the rank of corporate vice president at Microsoft. Is this his way of announcing that he intends going on the attack against Linux?"
Tomtom does indeed use FAT on the memory cards the maps are stored on.
Oh. Well, they deserve the lawsuit then. And a Darwin award.
But... but... but... they use linux! That means they're the good guys and MS is bad. Even if they really ARE infringing on MS's patents.
Is your data SAFE in a non-Microsoft format? How's that new version of ReiserFS coming along? You're spreading the very FUD people complain about going the other way.
> Although in this case MS did eventually lose but Stac went under.
Hey, I remember DOS 6.21. Of course Microsoft lies, cheats and steals. Always have and probably always will because it is just so ingrained in their corporate culture. Doesn't matter, we have all known this patent throwdown was coming and as the laws are currently written they have a legal leg to stand on, a lot better chance of winning than their sock puppet/trial balloon SCO ever had.
But Stac also died because full disc compression died. It was a very temporary situation where apps were bigger than affordable drives. Now apps get lost on a drive and it is the media files taking up the space and they are already compressed. Netware did the best compression back in the day, it compressed files that hadn't been accessed in a while and transparently uncompressed them again when they were accessed. Best of both worlds, more space without taking much of a CPU hit.
Democrat delenda est