Proving the Obviously Untrue

I read from Slashdot that Microsoft is taking legal action against TomTom over a number of alleged patent violations. Three of these are apparently targeted at the Linux kernel in use by TomTom.

Much of the focus of the discussion revolves around the use of FAT and FAT32 storage systems on media cards, and I have to confess this is an issue I hadn't previously considered very deeply. Microsoft has patents on these filing systems, and in fact it is important to note that Windows does not currently support any filing system that isn't one of Microsoft's own, patent entangled file systems.

There are very important, highly anti-competitive consequences to this.

• In order for media cards to work with Windows - still a practical monopoly offering in the operating system market - these cards have to support a MS entangled filing system.
• This likely means Microsoft is obtaining a revenue stream for all the licensing on many of these cards and their associated readers.
• Other operating systems, if they wish to be equally convenient to those using media cards, cameras, media players have no choice but to try and include support for these filing systems, even if they are not technically superior.

I would tend to agree with the observations of many that litigation here seems to be all that remains in a sad absence of innovation, but I would hope that if various legislatures have seen the browser issues as anti-competitive that they will consider issues like these too, especially if Microsoft starts throwing its weight around. It's not in any consumer interest for a single company to enjoy such dominance on such a wide range of products.

Update

Bruce Perens has written a good insightful analysis of this issue that also neatly encapsulates his well thought out view points on software patents in general.

Posted by Colin Turner

The FSFE recently interviewed me about my involvement with free software, and mainly, the education sector. You can read the interview here if you are interested.

Posted by Colin Turner

This Friday, the time from the start of the Unix Epoch will be 1234567890, as noticed by Linux Pro Magazine, and no doubt others.

Mathematics, being in many ways really the study of patterns is always interested in these kind of things. We are now several years on from 19-11-1999 where all the digits in the date are odd. That was the last such date for over a thousand years, the next being 1-1-3111, but then we are enjoying an era of lots of dates where all the digits are even right now, which started on the 2-2-2000 after the last one being 28-8-888 I guess.

Posted by Colin Turner

For some time now, I have been advocating that universities should create more free and open source solutions to fill the gaps needed within the education sector itself. Every year, thousands of computer science and engineering students in the UK alone rack their brains looking for undergraduate final year projects. Most of these will be isolated standalone demonstrations of skill that will never be seen again or used for any other purpose.

Too rarely do we encourage students to contribute to an existing major software project instead. Most often that will most practically be a FOSS project. There are several reasons why we do not, and probably the most significant is that there is still a large number of staff members in education that haven't the faintest clue about the FOSS world, and so many students are left unenlightened too. Another problem that is often cited is the difficulty in unentangling the contribution made by the student as an individual. However, with most source control systems it is trivial to extract this information and this could easily be made a requirement of the project.

So I was very interested when a friend referred me to a letter in the times expressing very similar opinions about major public sector projects. I agree completely, there is a major untapped resource out there in staff and students, which would gain real life experience in enterprise projects. As the letter's author suggests, the culture of pride in software (especially in free software) would help improve quality and education the public in the value of free software solutions.

Posted by Colin Turner