On the TomTom settlement: Microsoft Rolls Back its “Open” Promises

Who ever believed anything Microsoft ever said about "embracing" open source? Other than the old deadly "embrace, extend, extinguish". They will say whatever they think they have to in order to get ahead.

"Who ever believed anything Microsoft ever said about "embracing" open source? Other than the old deadly "embrace, extend, extinguish". They will say whatever they think they have to in order to get ahead."

to get ahead and to keep the DOJ and European Union of their arses.

> Who ever believed anything Microsoft ever said about "embracing" open source?

That's what I was thinking when I read that part.

Instead of complaining about Microsoft, perhaps some of the brains at the FSF could develop a replacement for FAT, and encourage it's use.

Is there something special about FAT? Isn't it popular merely due to the fact that it is popular? (I know very little about filesystems.)

@Tracyanne: Why should FSF develop something? LogFS is perfect for flash. For larger devices such as external drivers and SSD Btrfs will work just fine.

Well then as an industry group FSF need to be promoting these file systems to manufacturers and helping to ensure that the ability to read/write them is available to windows and mac users. It *shouldn't* be that difficult, every manufacturer makes a CD available to Windows and Mac so they can install any software necessary for the device to work with those OSs.

tracyanne -- there are already alternatives to FAT, but the problem is, Microsoft has a virtual de-facto monopoly on the deskop and significant share in servers, and FAT is about the only "least common denominator" that they and the other proprietary OS and commercial UNIXes mostly all support. Getting something widely implemented in FOSS is no big problem, but getting Microsoft to implement something so it is ubiquitous or requiring Windows users to install 3rd party file system drivers are much bigger problems. Unless Microsoft was REALLY serious about interoperability, which unfortunately they are NOT, they are the impediment to their being an open standard that works with all OSes.

It shouldn't be such a big problem, actually. First off, there's a change in filesystems going on. Microsoft is trying to get the industry standardised on exFAT, a new filesystem. Since filesystems are going to be changed anyway, now is the perfect time to lobby for LogFS or Btrfs.

Also, virtually all thumbsticks come with crappy small read-only partitions that auto-install crappy proprietary windows thumbstick managers and other crap (catching my drift? I really, really hate those!). If they can do that, they can autoinstall LogFS drivers on Windows as well as soon as you put the thumbstick in.

>> If they can do that, they can autoinstall LogFS drivers on Windows as well as soon as you put the thumbstick in.

Except that those small read-only partitions are probably FAT.

If they're read-only, they could also be ISO9660 or UDF.

Quoting:The MS-PL license specifies: "If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software." Also, source-code licensed under MS-PL can only be licensed under MS-PL.

That's going to throw a spanner in the works of anybody who wants to modify code and then pass it on under a different license, such as the GPL. Also, those who don't believe in patents or copyrights - never mind passing them downstream - won't like MS-PL.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/02/microsoft_asp_open_s...

And that's different from the GPL how?