Did TomTom test Microsoft's Linux patent lock-down?

@Flocke Kroes

> Patents were created to increase the rate of technical progress by providing incentives for inventors to describe there inventions to others. Modern patents can only be read by patent lawyers .... mostly because of the damages for willful infringement. ... Patents on CODECs are particularly nasty.

I mentioned the example of a codec because it points to another reason for patents beyond "getting inventors to disclose". Namely the case where you have a pure research lab which spends a lot of time and money on research to create a codec with good compression, in which there's merit in a system that allows them to get paid for their research. In other words, either of the following would be bad:

1) Pure research lab that does not make products itself -> no revenue. Meanwhile product companies get rich without paying them.

2) Company A does R&D and sells product. Company B freeloads off company A's research and therefore sells the product cheaper, undercutting A. (This one is the reason that drug companies are so much in favor of patents.)

The point is that the justification for the patent system is to make sure the inventor can get "fair payment" for their invention and/or R&D. And the "incentives for inventors to describe their inventions to others" are the price that society imposes on inventors as a quid-pro-quo for this, not necessarily the original goal. Microsoft may not necessarily need the money, but some others do.

It's true that lots of people don't read patents though. I did say I hadn't read these specific patents, after all :) Stuff still gets disclosed in technical journals though, which people do read.

> For all those newbies thinking clause 7 is an own goal

You may not have aimed this comment at me, but I'm not suggesting it's an own goal - it's there for a very understandable reason. But the catch-22 problem can still arise, and it's not the patent holder's fault. The FSF just decided they preferred this all-or-nothing situation instead of a lot of GPL software where the freedoms weren't really usable because of patents the original author knew about.

yer man Vaughan-Nichols

seems to be making the point (at http://blogs.computerworld.com/linux_companies_sign_microsoft_patent_protection_pacts) that MSFT has done licensing deals with 18 companies, under NDAs, that puts these 18 companies in breach of the GPL.

Whilst it may well be that the FAT patent can be evaded by using another fs, there is still the problem of existing breaches of the GPL by persons unknown.

where is the problem?

If the FAT patent is valid, which is not clear, then weed FAT out! FAT has been designed for floppy disks in the CP/M era of computing, it's neither made nor suited for flash memory in the GB realm.

I don't need FAT filesystems, do you?

Ext2 for Windows?

An excellent idea, but only if there is some agreement on who provides the file system driver. If every widget provider abandons FAT and starts shipping their own code for (say) ext2, I foresee misery for any consumer who buys more than one such device. Like PDF, you wouldn't need to agree to a *sole* provider, but the end-user would have to have the final word on which code they used. Such cluefulness on the part of hardware vendors is probably too much to hope for.

Incidentally, *is* there already ext2 or ext3 support in Windows? (3rd parties, obviously)

more than a sat nav...

Perhaps this is a symptom of a fundamental shift. A typical sat nav is starting to become much more than a sat-nav... Time to strike before it's a missed opportunity... I think FAT is used to encourage people to put their mp3s / personal files / funny characters on them as easily as possible... Probably ms didnt care when there was no market overlap.

I wonder - maybe one day TOMTOM will take BMW to court and say "they shouldn't bundle ONLY BMW satnav in a new BMW... It's anticompetitive!"

And hence the floodgates open - fingers in pies, on the double.

FAT, ext2/3 and patents

@Matthew Joyce

The implementation of FAT in the kernel is GPL. TomTom could create a new implementation under a different license and distribute it as a closed source kernel module. There is little point in doing this as Microsoft would still demand royalties for unenforcible invalid patents.

@facts and fairytales

1. Big difference between wilful and accident infringement.

2. Software patents can be purchased almost anywhere. In the US, software patents were seriously defanged in Re Bilski. In the EU, you have to call 'software patents' 'computer implemented inventions' or they will be rejected. Judges have caught on that a 'computer implemented invention' is a software patent, and should never have been granted. Even if there was not prior art, the FAT patent would unenforcible everywhere (except perhaps Australia).

3. IP is not legal term. There are patents, trademarks and copyright. The term IP is used by people who do not know any better and those deliberately trying to misapply the reasoning behind laws for physical property to patents, trademarks and copyright. If you have a point here at all, be very specific: what patent, what date, and against whom?

4. The GPL has always given you a choice: Cathedral or Bazaar. The only new thing here is that Bazaar is now popular enough to hit Microsoft's profits hard.

@Charles Smith, @Remy Redert

The patent is about long file name support that is compatible with a previous file-system that was limited to short names. There is still prior art. Not a problem to ext2/3/4.

@QrazyQat

SCO only achieved one thing beyond their own destruction: They demonstrated that caving in to nuisance litigation is more expensive than standing up to empty threats. Also: pay of one troll and you will get whole horde of them at your door tomorrow.

@Hugh McIntyre

> The point is that the justification for the patent system is to make sure the inventor can get "fair payment" for their invention and/or R&D.

The patent system fails to reward inventors. If you invent something, manufacturers can wait twenty years to use your idea for free (popular tactic for the car industry). Manufacturers can use your idea and be confident that you cannot afford to defend your patent - it is really expensive to defend a patent, and all the time you are trying, the manufacturer has a revenue stream from your idea which he can use to delay the litigation.

The most effective way to profit from an idea is to sell your own product. You get at least one and often two years before competitors get something to market. During that time you have a revenue stream for researching a second generation product, so you can repeat the cycle before a patent can even be granted.

There are ways to profit from patents: You can lie about the existence of a patent and get it included in a standard (Remember Rambus and JEDEC?). You can patent other peoples ideas. If any of them turn out to be profitable, you can the sue whoever did all the work to change an idea into a revenue stream. If you are part of a cartel of companies with cross licensed patents for a communications product, you can prevent new entrants into the market by updating the protocols to use new patents whenever old patents expire.

And as for drug companies: the patent system ensures that poor countries that cannot afford patented drugs and become sources of infection for people in rich countries. It would be far more sensible to reward drug research directly than to bump up the global price of medicine.

Out of all the thousands of patents filed in the last year, can you name a single one that should have been granted, earned money for the true inventor, was not submarined into a standard and will not sicken thousands of people in the third world?

Having read the patents

the scariest thing is that anyone would think they were technological innovations.

If they are I've three intergalactic matter transporters in my garden shed and my youngest daughter is riding round the living room on a little one with three wheels!

@Remy Redert

The USPTO would LOVE to be more selective in its acceptance of patents. However, their hands are tied for two reasons. 1) They're short-staffed. The Department of Commerce (that the USPTO falls under) doesn't exactly get the attention, say, the Department of Defense does in the budgets. They don't have the manpower needed to go through the patent applications intelligently. 2) There is a time limit on which to act. According to federal law, once a patent application is filed, a protester only has a certain amount of time to act and has to it smartly (this was good-intentioned--Congress was trying to prevent applicants from getting harassed).

New News?

MS trying to crush better people who can actually innovate is nothing new.

Their slimy octopus model has worked at times so they'll continue to do it.

Long Filenames predate Microsoft

If you go back to VMS V1.5 (or thereabouts if my memory serves me correctly) circa 1977/78 you will find that the Files-11 ACP2 Files System was able to handle long filenames

As well as doing versioning up to 2**16 versions of the same file which is something that the vast majority of other filesystem types can't do even today. File versioning came in tihe RSX11-D/M in the mid 1970's on PDP-11 processors. They used the Files-11 ACP1 format.

Sigh.

Personally I hope that the Microsoft Patent is found to be invalid and that TomTom get a bid wad of $$$ as damages but due to the tricks that lawyers play with the US Legal system in order to line their own pockets, I would doubt that TomTom would ever see any of the money at all.

Are Microsoft aiding their own demise?

I've been looking at this since this first appeared on The Register.

I've been thinking that Microsoft must be aiding their own demise - Microsoft must made a large sum from IP as well as selling software (Windows/Office/etc) and hardware (Xbox/mice/keyboards/etc).

If they (Microsoft) win this case surely they will be aiding companies (said companies will no longer need/want to use the FAT without a license or will convert their legacy devices to ext2 or some other free file system). If 'said companies' use FAT, then they are also having to pay a royalty and in these financial times they may not wish to continue to do this.

Also what is to stop TomTom from going to said "other companies" which license or currently use unlicensed FAT usage from switching to the same future file system (ext2 or other) and release it under a license which bans/stops Microsoft from using it.

This would put Microsoft in a position where they are in a 'catch 22' situation (especially if said file system was released under say a GPL 2 or 3 license).

TomTom could do this out of revenge for loosing in court and Microsoft would lose royalties from FAT as nobody would continue to use it).

TomTom is also in a position where they could force a firmware update on older device and build in support on new devices when maps are freely downloaded (they would technically then remove the FAT file system and use ext2 instead). They could do this as a "security update".

Mike

Just move FAT out of the kernel

There is a very simple solution here:

Move FAT out of the kernel and into a FUSE module and relicense that code as BSD or whatever.

Once the FAT code is out of the kernel it is very easy to dodge any Linux kernel GPL issues.

or..

change the GPL licence? its only a few words to change remove!

TomTom refused to pay up, they are breaking patent law, they should pay up.

Weather or not teh software patent should have been allowed is another thing entirely, you only have the US to blame for that for allowing them.

monopoly abuse

As others have mentioned - Tom Tom could quite easily use another filesystem.

But as windows will need extra software for installed for this filesystem to work (expect a service pack update to break it on purpose on a 'security' basis) - this complicates things for end users.

All OSs should have a common open free filesystem with mandatory full support.

Please someone who in Govt who isn't taking a bribe. Please break that p.o.s company up.

...and then there was two

Reading post on here you would think Apple and Microsoft were the only two computer companies that have ever been... DEC VMS had long file names long before either of these two crawled out of the primordial cess-pool. Surprising though it may seem the history of computing does not begin in 1975, and there is nothing new under the sun (oh I forgot about them, do the still exist ?)

MSDOS

I guess none of the commenters here have partitioned a drive in the last 10 years. When you fire up fdisk, or whatever your favourite partitioning too is, you partition the drive using the MSDOS partition table. Up to 4 primary partitions and as many secondary (extended) partitions as you like. So every Linux system out there is using MSDOS regardless of what file system they format the drive with. Try to set up your ext3 partition without using the msdos partition table. I for one have never seen an option to use any other.

MSDOS By john

Partitioning of discs and things like File Allocation Tables (FATs) were around before Microsoft was born. I used partitioned discs on IBM and ICL mainframe computers in the period 1971 - 1973. Prior art I'd say.

patent abuse.

FAT was developed in late 1970's. It's old, but serviceable. What I don't understand is how the hell Microsoft can still HAVE a patent on technology that is over 30 years old. Patents are supposed to run out after 19 years. This is pure, unadulterated abuse of the patent system by a company noted for its abuse of any process it gets involved with.

However, that's the rules. Unfortunately, Microsoft still refuses to support a filesystem they don't own, and because of Microsofts de-facto monopoly nobody can use anything else either and expect their stuff to work with Microsoft products. Perhaps these anti-trust folks dropped the ball somewhere, and should force Microsoft to YET AGAIN stop using their de-facto monopoly to push competitors out of business. This means force Microsoft to support at least ONE filesystem that they don't own and control software (ie: abusive, monopolistic and completely against the purpose of patents in the first place) patents in. Which is what they are yet again trying to do with this lawsuit against Linux.

Fuck Microsoft. For 30 years they've held back progress by creating users who think crashes are "normal", by forcing innovative companies to die off before they couldn't compete with Microsoft's monopoly, and by using shady and downright illegal methods to push their crap on the world, such as the recent ISO debacle. Someday, when the revolution comes, I'll be all to happy to put the local purveyors of this filth up against the wall and do my bit for a more competitive computer ecosystem.

@AC 14:37

> > BTW I would have thought it should be easy to support ext3 or whatever on windows, just insert an auto run exe file[...]''

> What fs type will you use for the partition that contains this exe? You can't make it ext3 (or whatever) because the user would need to have the driver installed already, and you can't make it FAT for the very reasons we're having this discussion.

ISO9660

However autorun is a major malware vector so in a locked-down environment you won't be able to run the executable.

NDA so people don't know they are paying up.

I have read this in detail.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/linux_companies_sign_microsoft_patent_protection_pacts

18 companies including Kenwood, Alpine and Pioneer according to Horacio Gutierrez of MS (Isn't that violation of the NDA they signed) are using GPL

I could not figure out why someone would not want you to know their software could read a now 28 year old file format with a method of supporting long file names which is at least 10 years old.

So what would happen if you approached one of them and asked for a copy of the source for one of their devices?

Logic says the should say "Sorry its closed source." If they don't MS can presumably do them later, and anyone who got source off them and hence is "infected." As others have noted it creates a 2 tier customer base. Those who have rights to MS elements and everyone else.

Tom tom seem to be taking a different route.

Feeding a large hungry troll is no way to get rid of them. It makes them larger. It does not lessen their hunger.