Every once and a while some patent scare comes up in the Linux world, often from Microsoft. They all generally go like this: big company says vague thing about their patent and Linux; everyone freaks out. These sorts of issues generally divide technical Linux users into two groups. One group says that nothing should be done until they see a lawsuit, and the other says we need to drop everything else and abandon the piece of software in question.

I am, of course, overstating the problem a little, but that is the general idea. The most recent incident was when TomTom got sued by Microsoft over their FAT filesystem implementation. This, of course, created a lot of conversation, much of which was completely unproductive. Now, though, a patch has been submitted that should eliminate the potential violation.

Regardless of the patent violation’s existence or lack of existence, a patch that fixes the issue completley is a really good step. If every time these issues came up, they were simply patched as time allowed, we could end all the theoretical arguements about what to do and just fix the problem.