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Linux Patch Clears the Air For Use of Microsoft's FAT Filesystem
Ars Technica is reporting that a new kernel patch may provide a workaround to allow use of Microsoft's FAT file system on Linux without paying licensing fees. "Andrew Tridgell, one of the lead developers behind the Samba project, published a patch last week that will alter the behavior of the Linux FAT implementation so that it will not generate both short and long filenames. In situations where the total filename fits within the 11-character limit, the filesystem will generate only a short name. When the filename exceeds that length, it will only generate a long name and will populate the short name value with 11 invalid characters so that it is ignored by the operating system."
The reason that FAT is still around has more to do with compatibility than any kind of technical merit. Pretty much every version of Windows supports FAT, and most other operating systems can use it as well. I think most "smart" vendors have figured out that if they use FAT for their devices (music players, cameras, GPS units) then pretty much anyone will be able to use them. That's why it's important to have FAT support in Linux, no one is saying that you have to use it on your / partition though. :-)