TomTom may reveal the details of its FAT settlement, Topolanek escapes the room, and an IBMer might become the next PTO Director

In the wake of the Open Invention Network challenge to Microsoft’s patents related to Linux, the company’s good cop-bad cop routine has gone into overdrive.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) recommends that projects using GPL version 2 upgrade to the newer GPL version 3. One of the features of GPLv3 is better protection against possible patent threats than its predecessor.

"There has been a lot of press coverage about the Microsoft/TomTom settlement. Unfortunately, so far, I have seen no one speak directly about the dangers that this deal could pose to software freedom, and what our community should consider in its wake. Karen and I discussed some of these details on our podcast, but I thought it would be useful to have a blog post about this issue as well..."

Tomboy's role in GNOME has made it a troublesome component that grabs an entire Mono stack into many GNU/Linux distributions. For reasons that were brought up before, the TomTom lawsuit teaches everyone why Mono does not belong in GNU/Linux.

The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin got the same message from the TomTom story that I did: just get rid of Microsoft's FAT filesystem: 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.

TomTom and Microsoft have settled the patent litigation. Here's TechFlash's coverage. According to the Microsoft press release, TomTom will remove functionality regarding the FAT patents within two years, which is no big deal, frankly, and in the meantime, they are covered "in a manner that is fully compliant with TomTom's obligations under the General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2)"