Linux – legal FAT?

By Detector | 04 July 2009



After Microsoft’s claims against the Tom Tom for using FAT file system on Linux devices, many manufacturers of portable devices with Linux on FAT are worried that they will be sued by Microsoft.

The Linux Foundation has issued a recommendation for Linux developers to remove FAT base from their projects, but that is not possible in the moment because many products and applications still depend on FAT file system, so the Open Invention Network is searching the proof that the FAT solutions were used somewhere before Microsoft patented it.

But as always, Linux has solution for this problem. Andrew Trigdella released a kernel patch last week that converts short file names (8 +3) to long and vice versa. The Patch leaves the short name file only in that form, and when a file has long name, the system only saves it with a long name – living the invalid characters in short name file that OS ignores (in that case OS ignore a short name file) and that is how Linux take round of the Microsoft patent.

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3 Responses to “Linux – legal FAT?”

  1. Veshengro says:

    Has Microsoft got nothing better to do than to sue other people?

    One should think that there were other things that they could do, such as making an operating system that, in fact, works well.

    But apparently that is not what they are after. All they want is to have the monopoly and then some and to hell with the users.

    Oh, for a world where everything would work with Linux and we would no longer have to play about.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Nope, that's their business model. Licensing technology.

    BTW, it's Andrew Tridgell (of Samba and rsync fame), not Andrew Trigdella :-)

    -c

  3. Does MS ever have anything better to do, rather than sue all the time!?






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