Ars Technica reported on a recent lawsuit filed by Microsoft against the GPS maker, TomTom. What's interesting is the potential ground this lawsuit may cover, including Microsoft's FAT filesystem. FAT is well documented, runs on any version of Windows and almost universally on Linux and Apple operating systems. This universal OS support makes it an attractive candidate for mobile storage media such as digital camera memory cards, MP3 players, phones, GPS units, etc. Although Microsoft mostly disregarded FAT as a hard disk filesystem for it's desktop/server operating systems in favor of it's newer NTFS filesystem, FAT is still widely used today throughout the entire industry outside of Microsoft itself. A copyright lawsuit against TomTom for the use of FAT could create an enormous ripple in the computing industry that relies so heavily on it's use.
Though this has the potential to be a disaster, I can't help but to encourage Microsoft if it really plans to push this further. Alienating mobile device vendors that use FAT by forbidding the open use of the filesystem means a large majority of those vendors will pursue open royalty-free alternatives. FAT is antiquated and there are many other viable filesystems for the industry to adopt. This has the potential of becoming a very good technological push forward for the industry as a whole. There will be some pains for sure, but I can only encourage Microsoft in alienating itself from an industry that has become reliate on FAT and essentially forcing an upswing in filesystem adoption to more open platforms. If that's the case, then thank you Microsoft.
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