Microsoft's brawl with TomTom over FAT patents has been seized on by software-freedom advocates as a wake-up call for people to adopt GPLv3.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) recommends that projects using GPL version 2 upgrade to the newer GPL version 3. One of the features of GPLv3 is better protection against possible patent threats than its predecessor.

TomTom and Microsoft have settled the patent litigation. Here's TechFlash's coverage. According to the Microsoft press release, TomTom will remove functionality regarding the FAT patents within two years, which is no big deal, frankly, and in the meantime, they are covered "in a manner that is fully compliant with TomTom's obligations under the General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2)"

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Microsoft may view its legal settlement with TomTom as a patent victory of sorts but it’s a hollow and meaningless win in the eyes of some in the open source community.

This is exactly what we were afraid of. Last month, when Microsoft sued Dutch GPS-maker TomTom on the principle that parts of Linux -- which form the guts of TomTom's device -- violate Microsoft's patents, we hoped for a quick settlement.

The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin got the same message from the TomTom story that I did: just get rid of Microsoft's FAT filesystem: The technology at the heart of this settlement is the FAT filesystem. As acknowledged by Microsoft in the press release, this file system is easily replaced with multiple technology alternatives.

When Microsoft first sued TomTom for patent violations in TomTom's Linux-powered navigation devices, I wasn't sure how much of a fight TomTom would put up. Legally TomTom was between a rock and a hard place. You can't use restricted-use patents in GPLed software.