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Recently, Microsoft and TomTom reached a settlement agreement to end a dispute which started when Microsoft sued TomTom over alleged patent infringement over its FAT file system. As it turns out, the settlement agreement can have unexpectedly quite big impact on the Open Source community and the entire industry.

Importantly, the terms of settlement have been formulated in a way that TomTom de facto has admitted to the violation and has agreed to pay license fees to Microsoft. However, the case raises a serious problem - the FAT is used not only in the TomTom navigation devices, but also in a countless number of other devices such as mobile phones, MP3 players and digital cameras. In addition, Linux has a built-in support for the FAT.

No wonder that more and more often we can hear (e.g. Jim Zemlina, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation) that FAT is easy to replace with number of other technologies. He also plainly suggest developers to give up the FAT. If, however, FAT is really removed from Linux, you could not read data from USB flash drive or digital camera. However, the questions arises – what will the Open Source community do if one day Microsoft requests for the removal of FAT from Linux?.