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EU state rules - Microsoft CAN own patent for FAT long filenames!

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yourlife:
Either way Microsoft made a mistake, everyone will use their own systems, making compatibility with Windows almost impossible.

Calum:
however the vfat filesystem will remain the de facto standard. as aloone jonez says it just means somebody writing a proper windows interface for ext3 or whatever (though will this be harder than for example ntfs support for linux?)  and yet most people get their various storage devices preformatted with vfat, that's the real issue, same as people who get their PC preloaded with ms windows.

so saying this is not an important issue is missing the point. it may not be an important issue for a small minority, but it still is, because if it's an issue for the majority, even if you're not part of it, you still have to live in the society formed by that majority.

worker201:
As a sidetrip from this topic, what is a good replacement.  I've always formatted my usb sticks as VFAT because it was the most usable format for moving data between my Mac and a Windows computer.  What about between a Mac and a Linux computer?  The Mac is using HFS+ and the Linux computer is using ext4.  For now, VFAT will work, but eventually, the incomplete support from both OSX and Fedora will cause the drive to be cluttered and clogged, unless I can use Windows to clean up or reformat.

Aloone_Jonez:
I wasn't talking about replacing VFAT, just the long file name convention which is the only thing that's patented, unless it applies to any incomparable method of implementing long file names on VFAT, in which case we need a different system.

I would've thought that ext3 would be too complicated to implement on embedded device with a tiny amount of memory. The file system needs to be simple as possible, no journalling, per user permissions or anything complicated like that, only simple file name, date, time and attributes need to be stored.

worker201:

--- Quote from: Aloone_Jonez on  4 May 2010, 09:34 ---I wasn't talking about replacing VFAT...

--- End quote ---

I was.  I'm serious insofar as I am interested in finding a filesystem that is totally compatible with either my Mac (HFS+) or my Linux (ext4) to use on a thumbdrive that will be transferring data back and forth between the two.  My concern is not that I'm violating a Microsoft patent, but that I won't be able to do comprehensive disk maintenance without Windows nearby.

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