Hi Rugxulo, (sorry about the long thread while the FS candidate list shrinks...)
>> 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. Referring to two items linked from the wikipedia VFAT article here: "In the EFI FAT32 specification[7] Microsoft specifically grants a number of rights, which many readers have interpreted as permitting operating system vendors to implement FAT.[66]" > http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4cc9-843a-923143f3456c/fatgen103.doc > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2aq5M3Q76U And as mentioned, cases of MS trying to sue against Linux VFAT use were not about sueing Linux itself, but manufacturers of devices using VFAT in embedded style, such as TomTom GPS navigation... >> 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. > > HPFS is from 25 years ago, long since unpatented. Plus, it's Well it barely gives any improvement compared to FAT32, which is why even OS/2 moved away from it. Feature-wise, HFS+ sounds nice and at least a bit multi-platform. There may be patent issues for HFS+ and the Linux driver for it does not support journal writes. Even a Linux filesystem may have patent issues (Oracle owned...). The features of HFS+ today are similar to ext3 or ext4, but to be really multi-platform, you should use only ext2 or ext3, as even for Windows, not ext4 drivers seem available yet? Basically only ext, NTFS and UDF are supported by all big operating systems. If you worry about NTFS upgrades perpetuating patent validity, only ext2, ext3 and UDF remain as relatively safe and portable. Note that UDF has some nice extensions for random-write media, too :-) This all excludes popular Linux filesystems, exFAT, HFS+ and more. Regarding protected mode SSE multi-programming-lingual drivers, it might be possible, but it sounds rather painful to me. Better use C and try to keep a simple maintainable net/CDEX style DOS driver :-) So... Whoever is bored is welcome to support ext2, ext3, UDF, exFAT and maybe NTFS and HFS+ for DOS. Half of them have license debates. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
