Slashdot Mirror
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?"
3 patents relate to car navigation systems and I can't really tell who's right...
But patent 5579517 is very simple for all to understand: it's the infamous way of Windows 95 to offer long file names (32 characters) over DOS, which only allowed 8-character names.
So Microsoft patented the way to store a cross-reference between the nice, readable filename, and the ugly, DOS name.
Does Linux do that? Sure, there might be a FAT driver somewhere... But I hope TomTom doesn't use FAT. If so, Microsoft is abusing the patent process.
And am I the only one to see irony in the fact that Microsoft patented a software defect?
People who live in glass houses not an issue here!
Microsoft has patented a bunch of stuff related to FAT32 and has aggressively licensed FAT32. They would have pursued this regardless of the OS underneath the TomTom software.
is to get companies to start using a different FS on memory cards. In particular, it might be useful to pick one of the OSS FS and see it dominate the industry. All it would take is several large companies to decide to change NOW, and the rest would follow.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Skip the ads and get the PDF of the complaint:
http://media.techflash.com/documents/tomtomComplaint.pdf
A quickie read of it still has me going "WTF!?" a lot. Seriously - they patented such things like:
"Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Connectivity"
"Portable Computing Device-Integrated Appliance"
A quick look at the dates these things were granted, and most gadget geeks' memories should spark something: Most of this crap shouldn't have been patentable in the first place (wish they appended the patents to the complaint, though... it'd make things a lot easier to eyeball and evaluate in one spot).
I'm guessing MSFT is just hoping to force a settlement, so that they can then use it as a cudgel... thing is, Microsoft is using a lot of OSS code nowadays too (IIRC in MSN/Live Messenger, Visual Studio 2008, and etc - linky here).
But its growth can be stunned. The lawsuits are not designed to stop Linux; a defendant with sufficiently deep pocket can fend off the attack, EVENTUALLY. The real intend of these suits are to stun the growth of Linux through FUD.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Netbooks are a serious threat to them, and they know it. To follow the netbooks will be larger machines with limited processing for the avg joes out there.
On a personal note, I find it very delightful that a company that Embraced, Enhanced, Extinguished, might be brought down by a tiny, cheap machine called EEE.
I know that it's always silly to try to predict the future, but here I go none the less. For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed. Unless business processes change significantly, there are only so many systems that a company will ever need to deploy. There will be word processing applications, spreadsheets, databases, webpages, file servers, print servers and a slew of other devices. However the core of the network and the computing environment will remain rather static. Over the last decade, Microsoft developed a lot of core business applications in the form of Windows, Windows Server, Office and Exchange. As the room for innovation in the IT world shrinks, Microsoft will have to fall back to the patent portfolio. If their lawyers were smart, they patented every single technology that they could with the foreknowledge that sooner or later, someone else would want to develop software to do the same thing.
I think we are going to see Microsoft leveraging their patents more and more aggressively as time goes on. They have poured untold billions of dollars in R&D. It seems to me like they need to pursue patent litigation to generate some sort of ROI on all those R&D dollars.
TomTom were found to be a gpl violator in '04, sued Garmin in '07 and Toyota in '08 for infringing TomTom patents, and have a very restrictive EULA.
A sig?!? I don't think so.....
A patent is supposed to protect a commercial product from being copied by the market. This is to promote people to share their ideas and collaborate while protecting the inventor. Patenting software concepts is counter intuitive to this process where no ingenuity of solving a problem is demonstrated. A lot of the patents that make it though now a days are really abusive of the protection and way to generalized to the technology they use.
Microsoft has been totally consistent in their rants on this topic. They are all for "Open Source" so long as they get a per copy patent royalty when it gets deployed in a shipping product. Because nobody can do anything without infringing their all encompassing patent portfolio. And they are probably right. And Linux is infringing patents held by every other tech company. Normally they just cross license between each other and little money actually changes hands, it is just a gate keeping new competitors without patents of their own to cross license at a disadvantage. Which is exactly where Linux is.
The patent system needs to be fixed. But every large company has billions invested in the current broken system AND, as noted above, depends on patents to keep new unexpected competitors from springing up.
Democrat delenda est
Why is the third link in the summary to a blog about the first link? Ok so the first link is the story itself then the third one which only has three statements of thought:
It's been in the air for ages, and now it's happening:
/*He copies in some summary sentences from the article. */
Presumably those are the three that relate to Linux, in which case this is likely to have broader implications than just the in-car navigation market.
Here's a nice statement of how Microsoft views all this:
/* He then posts a small quote from the first article. */
In other words, Microsoft "respects and appreciates" open source until it actually starts to replace Microsoft's offerings, in which case the charming smile is replaced with the shark's grimace.
It may not be a coincidence that Gutierrez has just been promoted to the rank of corporate vice president: could this legal action be his way of announcing the direction he and Microsoft will now take in the battle against Linux?
Is someone trying to get page hits here? What's the "direct hits to my blog" form of Slashvertisement?
Short filenames doesn't seem like a "Linux" issue to me since Linux doesn't do this. If Linux does have a driver that does this, then there may be some validity toward their claims. Perhaps that driver should be removed from Linux.
Linux's FAT32 driver does this. Removing the FAT32 driver would cause a lot of interoperability problems that would make Linux unsuitable for huge volumes of applications, e.g. accessing pictures stored on digital cameras (off the top of my head). TomTom needs this driver because they store the system on an SD card with the aim that systems can be upgraded/fixed by directly accessing the filesystem from a Windows PC, so they have to use either FAT32 or NTFS, and as Linux's support of NTFS is essentially a joke FAT32 is the only real option, therefore distributing a version without the offending driver compiled in is not an option for them.
If every OS except Windows is able to
then Windows isn't the right OS for Grandma.
I know Windows still has major market penetration in many segments of society, but Grandmas just aren't where it should be. Get 'er a Mac. Or if you'll install it for her, get her Linux.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
TomTom needs this driver because they store the system on an SD card with the aim that systems can be upgraded/fixed by directly accessing the filesystem from a Windows PC, so they have to use either FAT32 or NTFS, and as Linux's support of NTFS is essentially a joke
Linux's NTFS support is a joke? When did it stop working? I've been using it without problems for a couple of years now.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
From the shorter PDF:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6175789.html — Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7054745.html — Method and system for generating driving directions
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6704032.html — Methods and arrangements for interacting with controllable objects within a graphical user interface environment using various input mechanisms
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7117286.html — Portable computing device-integrated appliance
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6202008.html — Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5579517.html — Common name space for long and short filenames
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5758352.html — Common name space for long and short filenames
http://www.google.com/patents?id=02YIAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,256,642 — Method and system for file system management using a flash-erasable, programmable, read-only memory.
Some other text seems necessary in order to type stuff and get links in.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Yeah, but I'd watch for the Democrat-majority congress and along with the new Democrat administration to Bono-ize patent terms just as was done for copyright terms. If they'll do it for Disney, why not for the US' largest OS vendor Microsoft?
Because many other large corporations will also be adversely affected by extending patent terms. Also it's not just Democrats who extended copyrights, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was also called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act after the artist/performer Sonny Bono who was a Republican. Also though a Democratic President, Bill Clinton, signed it the Republicans controlled congress. 55 Senators and 228 members of the House, a majority in both cases, were Republicans.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I have been wondering what filesystem I should use for a flash card. Especially if I need compatibility. FAT doesn't quite fit the bill, especially if MS starts suing people over it. UDF seems to be the answer. (Wikipedia page)
It already has native drivers in most, if not all operating systems, MS windows (apparently XP doesn't have write support), Macs, Linux and even FreeBSD (as I understand). Frome what I understand, it is intended to reduce the number of writes (intended for rewritable CDs/DVDs), so it should give the longest life to the card. It supports many Posix / Unix filesystem features (hard/sym linking, sparse files, long filenames without ugly hacks, etc...)
However, I have troubles figuring out how to make Linux autodetect UDF, so I am not sure in my experiments I am creating the FS correctly.
What other choices are out there? For linux specific, ext2 seems to be the choice for native stuff, plus cramfs (sp?) for read-only. (I'm thinking of making a bootable flash card for my Asus EEE). I will probably have to use FAT for my digital camera as this is the only format it supports, but it appears to be the old-fashoned DOS shortname (not vfat or 32), so I guess these patents are not a problem?
This is what my research tells me, but it is not much.
Could UMSDOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umsdos) be seen as prior art for at long file name patent (http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5579517)?
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
I suspect MS has tried to push WinCE on Tomtom to replace Linux, and threatened them to sue them if they refused. These days, we see windows coming on devices where we would not expect it, and it is possible that there is some back pressure from MS.
One thing to add into this debate: Microsoft can have a big imposing patent portfolio and can patent something like the filename table mentioned above, but its patents *can* be bypassed by similar inventions. The original point of the patent system (as I understand it) was both to allow inventors to earn money from their inventions by giving them an exclusive right to them AND to give others an incentive to develop *new* mechanisms to work around patented ideas.
Basically, if your competitor had patented something and was successful, the only way you can make money is if you figure out how to develop around your competitor's patent (thus, supposedly spurring innovation). This is also, I guess, why software patents are significantly more difficult to administer than hardware patents.
It makes many patent cases (and patent portfolios) seem less intimidating when you look at them in this way.
Even more as their TomTom Home Windows application was built using xulrunner (mozilla).
Having so many Linux developers, yet not wanting to put in any effort to help Linux users. It's a shame, but not uncommon with companies using Linux for embedded devices and appliances.
This sig is intentionally left blank
Remember back when GIF was the number one image type on the internet? And then there was a licensing issue?
Almost killed the use of GIF as a filetype. Gave rise to the predominance of JPG and the growth of the PNG format.
I can't remember the last time I saw a gif that wasn't animated (Which seems to the be preferred small moving animatic format. For now.)
ntfs-3g is the driver to use. I don't remember if they still have the big scary warnings but in the usual Linux trend it was probably to say "do no use this in a mission-critical setting!!!" in the early days, I've used it with write support for years and never experienced any data corruption. I did earlier experience a bug in that writing files past the 2GB (or was it 4GB?) limit on external disks would fail with error, but that's gone too. My read/write speeds are completely on par with Linux file systems though the CPU usage is a bit higher.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There was an interesting point in these posts. Linux's FS ARE under GPL. 4 ways around that.
My own suggestion is that the Linux world should consider LGPLing the ext2 FS (yes, have to get ALL the authors to agree, but that is limited).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The patents in question are idiotic.
In two patents, Microsoft basically tries to claim rights to running a general purpose OS on a computer designed for a car and having Internet access on such a machine. This is trying to patent a market niche.
In two other patents, they are trying to claim rights to the awful long/short filenames compatibility hack in FAT file systems. One patent is trying to claim allocating space from flash erasable memory in blocks. And the last patent is related to modes in user interfaces. All of these are trying to patent what any competent software developer would come up with when faced with such a programming task.
I hope Microsoft will be shredded to pieces in court.
Aside from the FAT issues, these are even more troubling:
6175789 - Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture
6202008 - Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity
There are a lot of people in the geek community who build Linux-based car computers: http://www.mp3car.com/ . These patents, at first reading, seem to lock up that entire product space. Or at least, that's how Microsoft is going to spin it...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.