New Linux patch to circumvent Microsoft’s FAT patents

If you had followed the legal tussle between TomTom and Microsoft, you would know it was about the implementation of FAT filesystem in TomTom’s GPSes. According to Ars Technica, Andrew Tridgell, one of the lead developers behind the Samba project, published a patch last week that will alter the behavior of the Linux FAT implementation. The specific patents in question describe techniques for implementing a “common name space for long and short filenames.” It is a hack for preserving backwards compatibility with the filename munging scheme that was used in MS-DOS when filenames could not exceed 11 characters and were displayed in the so-called “8.3″ format. The patch will alter the behavior of the Linux FAT implementation so that it will not generate both short and long filenames. In situations where the total filename fits... [read full story]                    

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