Navigation device-maker TomTom has settled its patent dispute with Microsoft, putting an end to the current round of litigation between the two companies. The terms of the settlement, which were announced by Microsoft on Monday, are said to be fully compliant with GNU’s General Public License (GPL).
The conflict between Microsoft and TomTom, which publicly emerged in February, raised serious concerns within the open source software community. Microsoft alleged that TomTom’s navigation products, which use the open source Linux kernel, infringe on a handful of Microsoft’s patents. Two of the patents cited by Microsoft cover legacy compatibility features in Microsoft’s FAT filesystem, support for which is implemented in Linux. Some feared that the lawsuit was the beginning of a patent litigation campaign by Microsoft against embedded Linux adopters.
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