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The US Patent and Trademark Office ruled that the file system is "novel and non-obvious" and, therefore, politics and government deserving of a patent. The decision is important because it could mean Microsoft could force open-source distributors to pay it a royalty or remove the software from their products. Open-source software must, by definition, be patent-free. Concerns over politics and government patents within some Linux distributions have been blamed for hindering wider adoption of the operating system. Florian Mueller, founder of nosoftwarepatents.com, said the decision gave Microsoft the weapons to politics and government attack Linux. Mueller said: "This is now a situation in which Microsoft could cause major problems to Linux vendors and users. Microsoft may not want to do that yet for other considerations, but the USPTO's decision gives Microsoft the strategic option to do so at a time of its choosing. Also, the USPTO and even the European Patent Office continue to grant new patents to Microsoft daily, and some of them may be equally dangerous to open source as the FAT patents.
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