Linux Patch Clears the Air For Use of Microsoft's FAT Filesystem 272
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 80's called (Score:3, Funny)
they want their obsolete file system back
Re:Can someone explain to me why this is important (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's time to show MS the power of *nix (Score:5, Funny)
You do realize that in the real world people play the prisoner's dilemma [stanford.edu], right?
Be nice. (Score:4, Funny)
It's not FAT; it's just big-boned.
Re:Can someone explain to me why this is important (Score:5, Funny)
Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
Then why would you want them to be FAT?
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)