By Detector | 04 July 2009

After Microsoft’s claims against the Tom Tom for using FAT file system on Linux devices, many manufacturers of portable devices with Linux on FAT are worried that they will be sued by Microsoft.

The Linux Foundation has issued a recommendation for Linux developers to remove FAT base from their projects, but that is not possible in the moment because many products and applications still depend on FAT file system, so the Open Invention Network is searching the proof that the FAT solutions were used somewhere before Microsoft patented it.

But as always, Linux has solution for this problem. Andrew Trigdella released a kernel patch last week that converts short file names (8 +3) to long and vice versa. The Patch leaves the short name file only in that form, and when a file has long name, the system only saves it with a long name – living the invalid characters in short name file that OS ignores (in that case OS ignore a short name file) and that is how Linux take round of the Microsoft patent.

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