Friday, April 09, 2010

Its time to ditch the FAT

Microsoft has been recently in news as new evangelists of open world, expressing affinity to openness and encouraging critics to give it a respite from cloud of doubts about its true intentions. But as someone has quoted, "Always the real Satan comes out from a veiled angel".When it comes to market and products, it again proves that it can't be trusted and is not willing to support truly open technologies.

The limelight has again fallen on it as a dispute with a reputed navigation device manufacturer in US called 'TomTom'.The conflict between Microsoft and TomTom raised serious concerns within the open source software community. Microsoft alleged that TomTom's navigation products, using the open source Linux kernel, infringe on Microsoft's patents (:p). The patents cited by Microsoft include compatibility features in Microsoft's FAT filesystem, support for which is implemented in Linux. Fears were raised that the lawsuit was the beginning of another patent campaign by Microsoft against embedded Linux community.

TomTom responded to Microsoft's lawsuit earlier this month using a countersuit that Microsoft had infringed some of its navigation patents. As conflict escalated, TomTom joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), an organization that has accumulated a defensive patent portfolio for protecting Linux from patent infringement lawsuits. It was also speculated the the larger Open Source / linux community would assemble for defense of their embedded developer brothers which has been averted for now by the settlement agreement between Microsoft and TomTom by which TomTom would pay for any infringement from its side.

But the real story of this is that microsoft has suffered in both ends, in the larger embedded product market and also in the IPR world. The deal would mean that Tom Tom would remove the functionality that is covered under the FAT patents. This will guarantee that the code in TomTom's Linux kernel can continue to be broadly redistributed downstream without patent redtape and without support of Microsoft, but having broad spectrum support from Linux Community.Another thing is that the Software giant would suffer further setbacks from Upstream kernel developers as they could potentially adopt TomTom's code changes in order to avoid future patent disputes with Microsoft over FAT.

The linux community has also come into the scene with a prominent stand:

" It has even gone to extent of announcing new kernel patches to work around Microsoft FAT patents according to this story:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21766/Linux_Kernel_Patch_Works_Around_Microsoft_s_FAT_Patents

" In the larger Storage and Clustered filesystems front, new alliances like "Open Cloud Manifesto" have sprung up with support of IBM to explore possibilities in
building interoperable open solutions towards open storage filesystems.

" And lately,open source big brothers are now keeping a close watch on the embedded and mobile development scenario against any such misadventure by large
monopolies.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin is the most vocal in his observation over this matter.He suggests that product makers should consider the possibility of rejecting Microsoft's legacy FAT filesystem and should instead adopt an unencumbered open source alternative.We can quote him as below:

"The technology at the heart of this settlement is the FAT filesystem. As acknowledged by Microsoft in the press release, this file system is easily replaced with multiple technology alternatives. The Linux Foundation is here to assist interested parties in the technical coordination of removing the FAT filesystem from products that make use of it today," he wrote. "Microsoft does not appear to be a leopard capable of changing its spots. Maybe it's time developers go on a diet from Microsoft and get the FAT out of their products."