Hi Rugxulo,

as mentioned earlier in this thread, generic operating systems
are allowed to implement VFAT (FAT32 and LFN) without fees, so
I would not be too worried about those two more years. Regarding
LTOOLS quality: This thing is ancient and of course it supports
only ext2, not ext3 or ext4. It is probably better to use the
source of VMSMOUNT as basis for TSR drivers for exFAT access :-)

Note that HPFS is owned by Microsoft (written while OS/2 still
was by MS and IBM together) and HFS+ is owned by Apple, so if
you want to be totally safe license-wise, you should use ext2.
I would not use more modern Linux filesystems, as you probably
need a TSR of several 100 kB to support those ;-)

Regarding nasty integers above 32 bits: No worries, as long as
we do not support GPT, we only support 2^32 sectors in MBR :-p
Also, you can of course use 64 bit data types in DOS software.

I agree that OpenWatcom would be nicer than Borland C++ here.
Not sure if Pascal would be nice for TSR drivers: You can do
it (see keyboard driver) but the extra effort is that you have
to translate existing filesystem code which probably is in C.

Remember that the Samsung code carefully got GPL-ed together
with some licensing experts after the initial accidental code
publication. You can have open source drivers for things that
need licenses to use, those things do not exclude each other.

In any case: Do not panic. At the moment, you are insisting to
deprive DOS of a feature that Linux has had for years. In spite
of having a much larger market share, nobody sued Linux either.

If anything, you may worry about having to get a license if the
DOS driver gets used in some embedded / appliance device, such
as a camera. Even then, the camera manufacturer would have to
get the license. The blame would still not be on DOS itself.

Regards, Eric



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