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The Real Reason for Microsoft's TomTom Lawsuit
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| That seems pretty definitive. The question now is what Microsoft hopes to
| achieve by bringing this lawsuit. A fascinating explanation is provided as a
| comment to my original post from Jeremy Allison. He's one of the leaders of
| the Samba project, and knows more than most about how Microsoft thinks and
| operates, since he's been heavily involved in the EU's efforts to get
| interoperability information from the company. Here's what he wrote:
|
| What people are missing about this is the either/or choice that Microsoft is
| giving Tom Tom.
|
| It isn't a case of cross-license and everything is ok. If Tom Tom or any
| other company cross licenses patents then by section 7 of GPLv2 (for the
| Linux kernel) they lose the rights to redistribute the kernel *at all*.
|
| Microsoft has been going around and doing these patent cross licensing deals
| with companies under NDA's so they never come to light for *years*.
|
| That was the whole point of the Novell deal - Microsoft lawyers finally
| thought they'd found a way to *publicly* do these cross licensing deals and
| get around the GPLv2, but the GPLv3 put paid to that.
|
| Tom Tom are the first company to publicly refuse to engage in this ugly
| little protection racket, and so they got sued. Had Tom Tom silently agreed
| to violate the GPL, as so many others have, then we'd only hear about a
| vague "patent cross licensing deal" just like the ones Microsoft announces
| with other companies.
|
| Make no mistake, this is intended to force Tom Tom to violate the GPL, or
| change to Microsoft embedded software.
|
| [...]
|
| So it turns out that the TomTom lawsuit goes to the heart of Microsoft's
| attacks on Linux, and its effort to stop people using it in embedded
| systems – an increasingly popular option, and one, therefore, that is
| increasingly problematic for Microsoft.
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http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1953&blogid=14
Linux companies sign Microsoft patent protection pacts
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| I dug this up during an e-mail discussion with Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's
| corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of intellectual property
| and licensing, Gutierrez said, "We have a history of licensing the patents in
| this case through patent cross licensing agreements with other leaders in the
| car navigation space, including Kenwood, Alpine and Pioneer, and through our
| FAT LFN (File Allocation Table/Long File Name) patent licensing program,
| where we have 18 licensees to date." This is being done under Microsoft's FAT
| LFN File System Licensing Program.
|
| [...]
|
| The most important reason why the specifics of these deals are under NDA is
| that any company doing a patent cross license without covering its downstream
| recipients, i.e. users, is a direct violation of GPLv2 section 7, and is even
| more explicitly a GPLv3 violation. In other words, if a company admitted to
| signing such a deal, it could not legally distribute software or hardware
| using Linux, licensed under the GPLv2, or Samba the file/print server
| licensed over the GPLv3.
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http://blogs.computerworld.com/linux_companies_sign_microsoft_patent_protection_pacts
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