The recently announced Microsoft patent action against TomTom has brought the Groklaw blog out of its semi-retirement. Groklaw made it's name by documenting, often in surprising detail, the SCO vs Linux debacle, which is still continuing with SCO in bankruptcy protection (actually the case was a series of legal actions involving SCO, IBM, Novell, Red Hat to name a few). Since the SCO vs Novell case, upon which much of the rest of this legal fiasco depends, is essentially over, with SCO sitting in the bankruptcy courts, Groklaw has been in semi-retirement with its prime author, PJ, taking time out to consolidated the library of posts and documents she has acquired over the last few years.
Over the years, Groklaw has followed a variety of cases where Open Source Software (OSS), and in particular software released under the GPL, and in many cases the shadowy presence of Microsoft has been inferred by contributors. Now it seems that Microsoft has finally decided to direct the big guns of the broken US software patent system at the GPS manufacturer TomTom. This is a complex action, including the use of the FAT file system.
As is typical of these cases, Microsoft shills around the internet have come out of the woodwork to try and promote the Microsoft worldview. I strongly recommend you read Groklaw's ongoing coverage of this story - begin with Enderle on TomTom - Here We Go Again - I think that this will run and run, and with TomTom refusing to lie down and be part of Microsoft's scheme aimed at destroying OSS competition, the discovery phase of the legal action will be very revealing.
This little device is a basic GPS datalogger, which comes with some pretty basic software which, though a little on the clunky side, does seem to work pretty well. I plan to use this with a small OQO pocket computer running Windows XP while travelling. The unit is 3.15"x2.75"x0.7", so is pretty compact. The silver coloured plate is the battery cover - it's powered by two NiMH cells (supplied), which are recharged via the USB connector. Other than that, there are only two controls - the big silver cover power switch and a mode selector on the side. The device comes with three preset modes, for pedestrian, bike and car travel (they differ in the data sampling rate), but these can be adjusted using the supplied software.