August 28, 2019 – For years, Microsoft used its patents as a way to profit from open-source products. The poster-child for Microsoft’s intellectual property aggression were the File Allocation Table (FAT) patents. But the Microsoft of then is not the Microsoft of now. First, Microsoft open-sourced 60,000 patents of its patent portfolio and now Microsoft is explicitly making its last remaining FAT intellectual property, the exFAT patents, available to Linux and open source via the Open Invention Network (OIN).