Hi FreeDOS-ers, > We could undercut the competition and make our own free FAT > implementation which does fills the same niche as exFAT.
Extremely unlikely to succeed! For example OGG Vorbis audio works very well and is free but still companies rather pay to license MP3. On Sony Smart TV (using Android Linux tech) you can NOT use OGG in the media player, but it does work in the image gallery: In other words, in spite of having a free support in the software, they deliberately removed it from the media player, only forgot their image viewer :-p In the case of exFAT, the thing apparently works well, better than classic FAT32. Plus it ships with millions of cameras, smartphones and other SDXC enabled software, as well as the millions of SDXC cards in those devices, which are factory- formatted to exFAT and (see my original question) might even get confused when you re-format them to, for example, FAT32. Of course, nobody stops you from reformatting your storage to FAT or even ext2/ext3/ext4 or similar filesystems. Well, apart from your camera or smartphone stopping to support them in that case, if you are unlucky. Next you could root those and install Cyanogen or similar OS, but mortals are not going to take that effort. They will just give you the SDXC card with their pictures and laugh at you if your VERY FREE operating system is FREE of the ability to open them. Regarding Jim's and Bret's comments, I would like to add this: Remember the old VFAT or "FAT32" discussion. There, in the end, it turned out that usage was explicitly allowed for a generic operating system like Linux or DOS! And remember my original posts in this thread, or to be more exact, the references from the Wikipedia article about the licensing issue: http://sfconservancy.org/news/2013/aug/16/exfat-samsung/ "Conservancy is delighted that the correct outcome has been reached: a legitimate, full release from Samsung of all relevant source code under the terms of Linux's license, the GPL, version 2." This does not tell whether you might have to pay licensing fees when using a Linux with that driver for making some embedded device, but for using it for interoperability in a general operating system, I would be optimistic. Also, nothing in the driver seems to talk about it and even in Ubuntu, you have the driver in official repositories with no special warnings about needing a license to use them. While I agree that further information would be welcome, I am generally optimistic about possibilities for exFAT. Regards, Eric > On 9/24/2015 3:22 PM, Jim Hall wrote: >> My understanding is similar to Bret's. Also, I understand the exFAT >> implementation on Android and other platforms was derived and licensed >> from Microsoft. It is patent-encumbered, and therefore cannot be >> merged with FreeDOS (or any code distributed under the GNU GPL, for >> example.) I would be very concerned about any effort to put exFAT >> support directly into the FreeDOS kernel. >> >> However, doing a little googling, I found that this developer has >> created an exFAT reader as a separately-loaded driver: >> http://www.mdgx.com/secrets.htm#XFAT >> >> If you want exFAT support in FreeDOS, I would use that. >> >> But include exFAT in FreeDOS? I don't think so; I prefer to avoid the >> lawsuit. >> >> Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
