Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Mar 2009 08:28 UTC
The whole FAT licensing saga between Microsoft and TomTom just got a whole lot more complicated. Microsoft sued TomTom because the satnav maker had not licensed FAT from Microsoft, even though several others have. This left TomTom in a difficult position: not license it, and face legal penalties - license it, and violate the GPL. The second part, however, is up for debate now: the terms under which Microsoft licenses FAT may not violate the GPL at all. Near-instant update: On Slashdot, Bruce Perens and Jeremy Allison have explained that the FAT terms are still a GPL violation. Allison accidentally emailed the journalist who wrote this story with the wrong information.
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RE[4]: Why not using a different file system? - SD card
by anda_skoa on Sun 15th Mar 2009 14:17
in reply to "RE[3]: Why not using a different file system? - SD card"
Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:
2008-07-15
Wow, I hadn't realized UDF was that versatile. I'd always thought of it as a filesystem used on DVDs, and it being read-only like iso9660 was. I was very wrong about this. I should've researched exactly what UDF was a long time ago, as it could have saved me a great deal of headaches a while back when I was moving some large files between OS X and Linux, files that were too big for fat32 to handle.
I'm experimenting with a USB drive formatted as plain UDF 1.02 (most compatible revision) and so far I'm actually quite pleased with the results. Only problem is OS X won't mount it through the Finder, though it will mount it if explicitly told to do so from the CLI, and obviously it reads UDF DVDs fine. Apparently UDF is not in the filesystem checks on USB media, wonder if I can change that. Linux and even my friend's Windows machine had no problems with it at all, and I'm not noticing any performance issues or problems with recovering free space after files have been deleted.
I'll definitely keep playing with this, I just might have to adopt UDF as my filesystem of choice for external media if I don't encounter any issues.