Worries over intellectual property can make for strange bedfellows. In the case of Microsoft Corp.'s nearly ubiquitous FAT (file allocation table) file system, it's Microsoft and the Linux community.
The open-source community has an enormous interest in the outcome of last week's decision by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine the patent Microsoft holds on the FAT file system, a format used for the interchange of media between computers and digital devices.
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