“Tuxera today announced the release of Tuxera exFAT for Android and other Linux systems. Developed using technical documentation provided by Microsoft Corp., Tuxera exFAT provides outstanding performance and stability, and meets the latest SDXC memory card standards.”
Are these people for real ?
I’m sorry, I know companies like Microsoft threaten other companies with lawsuits, but it’s all based on mumbo jumbo.
regardless exFat is a really good, dead simple, file system. To bad apple is so opposed to supporting it in OSX. they will cave once they realize all the memory cards are going to be using it and they won’t have a choice. It’s one thing to start a holy war against adobe (and even that is damn near insane), but it’s a whole other story to start one against MS…
I think the license restriction alone is reason enough to not support it.
The FOSS Nazis have spoken! No exFAT fora u!
As opposed to many Windows users, the “FOSS Nazis” respect the licences and patents of a software. And it’s unfortunately a fact that exFAT is covered by such and any developer re-implementing exFAT in FOSS must probably face possible legal threats from Microsoft. When you call someone a Nazi, then please Microsoft. They are the ones who enforce a non-free software standard to the industry here and try to exploit their licencees afterwards. There are plenty of free filesystems which are much better than exFAT. But Microsoft refuses to support them in Windows because they wouldn’t make any money out of it.
Adrian
“As opposed to many Windows users, the “FOSS Nazis” respect the licences and patents of a software.”
Do you listen to MP3’s on your linux box?
Yep, since software patents are not valid in my country, I feel no contradiction in listening to MP3s on my Linux machine.
On the other hand, the MP3 patent licensing only covers the distributors, not the users.
Instead of insulting people, you could think why they develop another file system when there are a lot, good, and free…
and the reason is…
M O N E Y F R O M Y O U
What licence restriction? Apple and Microsoft already have a comprehensive cross patent agreement, there is nothing stopping Apple from licensing the specifications and implementing exFAT themselves. With that being said, one can choose between PTP/MTP and MSC, so the need to support exFAT is a non-issue.
Not sure who you’re referring to. If you mean the device manufacturers can choose to support MTP or MSC, you’re right of course. The user can’t always choose though, it’s a matter of what their device supports. I have a Sansa Fuze, which does support both, but I’ve seen MSC only and MTP only players both. In this situation, ironically enough, it would be better to be MTP only than MSC only if the device uses ExFAT.
Except when you need to make a device (e.g. phone) that can host these SDXC memory cards.
True, very true but these vendors did have the chance to do something about it – create a royalty free file system and provide a plugin for Windows to support it. I always get the impression that some vendors want technology to be a one way street where Microsoft creates and they just ride on the back of that innovation.
How about a new file system based on maybe a simplified version of UFS? it would be naturally open source, there are BSD licensed implementations which should translate into widespread adoption. It’s just an idea I’m throwing out there – I don’t have the exact information on the file system but it sounds actually conceptually a good idea.
The world is plenty of really good, simple, free, file systems. Why someone wants to bring another? When their board of directors meet… they think about their interests and like to get money, you know :-).
what do you mean? these are the same guys that made ntfs-3g, but this time they have official support from microsoft
Except that, as I understand it, unlike ntfs-3g, this time the driver is not open source.
Edited 2010-06-04 00:25 UTC
For what? This is XXI century!
PS: fix the login form.
still most memory cards are pre-formatted with FAT and most devices like camera works with FAT formatted memory cards if you own any of those deices.. I wonder if you …
this is exFAT not FAT, it’s basically a FAT64 that supports file larger than 4gb and much larger partition and a few other stuff
I completely agree.
I couldn’t give a toss how much FAT has been fudged to work with SSDs – there are still far better file systems out there.
It’s about bloody time peoples dependance on *FAT* was removed. But sadly this will never happen so long as MS refuse to support other filesystems natively.
This problem isn’t really a Microsoft one. How many of the “free” filesystemas are gpl licensed? Sure many of us hate copyright/patent law and choose to ignore it but Microsoft can’t. People like Hans Reiser who choose to lock down their code to Linux only, are a large part of why there is no open standard filesystem other than FAT. It’s easy enough to port a filesystem driver to windows. There’s an IFS driver for reiserfs and ext3 so the technical side is easily accomplished. Licensing would be the main thing stopping it from happening. Microsoft and Apple wouldn’t be interested in porting over a filesystem unless it had real benefits. Easier to lock people into HFS+ and NTFS than get people onto a potential lawsuit with reiserfs or btrfs.