On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 10:56, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 05:38:33AM +1100, Kevin Waterson wrote: > > MS is set to begin charging a license fee for FAT file system > > FAT is used by camera manufacturers and more importantly is > > used on Compact Flash cards used by digital cameras. > > Don't know why. It's utterly shite for flash memory, since FAT keeps > hammering the same sections of the device, and flash has a limited number of > write cycles before it dies. JFFS2 is much nicer, I'm told.
Because FAT is ubiqituous. How does a hardware manufacturer like Canon go about making Windows support a new filesystem? A tiny little part of me hopes that the hardware manufacturers do pony up, because otherwise they'll most likely be resorting to dodgy proprietary means of reading and writing to their storage, which will become a huge bugger if you want to use an operating system they don't support. Perhaps more importantly, what does this licencing mean to Free FAT implementations, like the the ones in Linux and *BSD? If they're somehow exempt, why don't all the camera manufacturers start using a BSD licenced one? :-) -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
