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Message 1: Microsoft’s FAT patent has been declared NULL and VOID by the German Supreme Patent Court. The reason: It’s not an invention in the legal meaning since everything “new” in this patent is so obvious to somebody who has the slightest clue about programming.
Read more about Microsoft’s defeat in Germany here.
Message 2: The German department of State has declared that their business case for their complete migration away from Windows towards Linux and other FOSS is based on SECURITY, RELIABILITY and COST reasons. They completed their migration of nearly all server and desktop systems WITHOUT the need for a RETRAINING of their stuff, while IT costs dropped even on the short run already below one quarter of the costs they had while using a Windows infrastructure. The article contains other success stories about the German federal administration migrating to FOSS.
Read more about this success stories here and for the background, here and here
(all articles in German language, use a web translation service if you want to understand all the dirty details, Steve :-) )
Quoting:By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
March 13, 2007
While the U.S. courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany.
According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a "common namespace for long and short filenames." This was based on Microsoft's U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are "not based on inventive activity."
FAT is a file system that Windows and other operating systems use to track the clusters of data that make up files on mass storage devices, such as hard drives or USB memory sticks. In Linux circles, it's best known for its use in the Samba server application. Samba enables Windows PCs to read and write files on Linux servers, and allows Linux desktops to access Windows servers.
Some supporters of Linux and free software have long feared that Microsoft could use its FAT patents to attack Linux vendors and users. While Microsoft has never done so, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has often made claims that Linux "uses [Microsoft's] intellectual property."
Read the full story on Linux-Watch.com: Microsoft FAT Patent Fails in Germany
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