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Open Source ExFAT File System Reaches 1.0 Status
Titus Andronicus writes "fuse-exfat, a GPLv3 implementation of the exFAT file system for Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X, has reached 1.0 status, according to an announcement from Andrew Nayenko, the primary developer. exFAT is a file system designed for sneaker-netting terabyte-scale files and groups of files on flash drives and memory cards between and among Windows, OS X, and consumer electronics devices. It was introduced by Microsoft in late 2006. Will fuse-exfat cut into Microsoft's juicy exFAT licensing revenue? Will Microsoft litigate fuse-exfat's developers and users into patent oblivion? Will there be a DKMS dynamic kernel module version of the software, similar to the ZFS on Linux project? All that remains to be seen. ReadWrite, The H, and Phoronix cover the story."
A file system is normally designed for one's own usages. A file system is entirely contained within your computer system (or in the event of a distributed file system, within computers under your control). What use then is "sneaker-netting" files between Windows, OSX, and Linux? Isn't this a network concept?
And over there we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask t
As far as I know it's part of OS X since Snow Leopard. But I could totally use the Linux support.
Obligatory XKCD
(Seriously though, patents on file system are bullshit.)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Standardise all you want. You should know what'll happen. Windows will not support it out the box, and if Windows doesn't support it, that filesystem is effectively dead. Who is going to want a USB stick formatted so it won't work on the operating system running on upwards of ninety percent of desktops and laptops?
First they'll give enough time for it to get established to the point of being considered an essential for any functional desktop.
*Then* they'll start suing.
As the name clearly states, this is a FUSE implementation of exFAT, i.e. userspace. In which case DKMS is as useful as a fork for soup.
So not only we get the news two days after Phoronix [1], but the poster has no idea on what he's talking about.
[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI3OTQ
Microsoft has already won by having ExtFAT part of the SDXC spec, so every big SD card comes with it. The only thing the Open Source world can do is damage control by implementing it and thus staying useful.
NTFS on linux was created through many years of hard work reverse engineering the filesystem from no documentation - what little MS had published was only available under licenses that would render it useless for open-source development. That it works at all is impressive, that it works so well is a small miracle. Even now, NTFS support in linux has to be via the NTFS-3G userspace filesystem - full support was never included in the kernel itsself, only read-only access. That may well be the future of linux and exFAT: It works, but exists in a legal grey area where MS could unleash the lawyers on a whim and requires untidy hacks to get around legal problems.
Am I allowed to use this implementation?
Depends on what you want to use for: as a form of expression, you should be able to. Use the binary form to read/write, all depends on the MS patents and whether or not MS grants you a license.
Will Microsoft litigate fuse-exfat's developers and users into patent oblivion?
Regarding developers: the software is posted as source code with instructions on how to install them from source. Being source code, is a form of expression, protected by copyright. As such, can a commercial entity try to block the dissemination of the "speech" that the source code constitutes?
Mind you, any existing patents should not play any role into it: after all a patent is a public disclosure of methods/constructs that constitute the invention (the text of the patent is not copyrighted), so the source code should not be anything but an alternative form of expression of the same.
Regarding users: yes, using the compiled binaries would violate the temporary monopoly granted by any existing patents. However, I can't imagine any corporations starting to track which hobbyist home users:
1. downloaded the source code - should not be, per se, illegal - the copyleft license allows you to do it and the patent should not trump the copyright.
2. for each of them, ask for a discovery to see if that source code has been compiled - again, compilation should not be illegal, I'm obtaining a derivative form of expression and the GPL copyright license allows me to do it
3. use the binary - this is the only step that would violate the patent
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Ext2/3/4 sucks as an interchange format. In short, it does too much. Any filesystem sufficiently complex to support real workloads is going to impose an excessive implementation burden for sneakernet. The bizarre thing is that we have a minimalist filesystem that can represent the file model with fidelity (large files, unicode names, etc) that is implemented in every modern OS: UDF. If it can read DVDs, it can read UDF and every general purpose OS released in the last decade can write to the appropriate version, 2.01. Not for nothing is it called the Universal Disk Format.
The real mystery is how did Microsoft con an industry into paying for such a lousy alternative to UDF. SDXC requires exFAT, so every new camera and anything else that hopes to read these high capacity sdcards has to cope with licensing requirements. WTF.
fuse-exfat is also an userspace driver like ntfs-3g. If US-based distros like Fedora ar able to ship with ntfs-3g installed by default, they might be able to do the same with fuse-exfat, unless Microsoft closed the legal loophole used for ntfs-3g.
You can call FAT and its variants a lot of things, but "modern" isn't one of them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's annoying using a file system with file ownership on a flash drive, because chances are the computer I plug the flash drive into has an entirely different set of user IDs that don't match up to the flash drive's files' ownerships. I wish there was an easy way to mount an ext filesystem with all of the files owned by a specific user id (such as the id of the active desktop user when I plug in the flash drive). I wouldn't be surprised if there already is a way, but it should be do-able via the UI and not require root access.
Jelly Bean's Play Store introduces DRM and that's incompatible with GPLv3.
I wasn't aware that the APK encryption in JellyBean was mandatory.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
How about when you are not admin? Installing software, especially drivers, are not always appropriate or even possible.