The TomTom case exposed a long-simmering problem resulting from the combination of patents, proprietary software companies and open source. Andrew Tridgell recently patched Linux’s VFAT implementation, but the cult of silence that surrounds intellectual property will bedevil open source projects for some time to come.
GNU/Linux. It’s free (libre) software that we all love to use. We love it because it works, because it’s open source and because it encompasses ideologies that many of us support and believe in. But what happens when these ideologies clash with the wider world? Free and open source software has very unique goals. Rather than developing an idea and locking users into that technology, it competes on the quality of the product and support services which go with it. This revolutionary paradigm is tearing down the model that has dominated the computing industry for the last number of decades.
http://www.linuxlinks.com/portal/news/article.php?story=20090507132902824