Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Mar 2009 08:28 UTC
The whole FAT licensing saga between Microsoft and TomTom just got a whole lot more complicated. Microsoft sued TomTom because the satnav maker had not licensed FAT from Microsoft, even though several others have. This left TomTom in a difficult position: not license it, and face legal penalties - license it, and violate the GPL. The second part, however, is up for debate now: the terms under which Microsoft licenses FAT may not violate the GPL at all. Near-instant update: On Slashdot, Bruce Perens and Jeremy Allison have explained that the FAT terms are still a GPL violation. Allison accidentally emailed the journalist who wrote this story with the wrong information.
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RE: what has a fat-license to do with the gpl?
by sbergman27 on Fri 13th Mar 2009 23:47
in reply to "what has a fat-license to do with the gpl?"
Member since:2005-07-24
nowhere does it say what implementation you must use, just that you have to guarantee compatiblity with the specification
And they would get around the GPL's requirements WRT patent encumberment... how? MS has seen how to put TomTom, and anyone else who uses GPL'd vfat code between a rock and a hard place. They could sue the 4 authors of the vfat code in the Linux kernel:
Werner Almesberger
Gordon Chaffee
Wolfram Pienkoss
OGAWA Hirofumi
but they have chosen another strategy.
Edited 2009-03-13 23:52 UTC
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Member since:
2005-07-06
i don't get how this in the slightest way has something todo with the gpl
when you follow the link in the article to the license-terms for fat you can read
nowhere does it say what implementation you must use, just that you have to guarantee compatiblity with the specification
tomtom could just license it, run the necessary tests, and be done with it
if the vfat implementation of linux is as good as is should be they won't even have to edit a single line of code