The big deal here is the patent grant. FAT related patents were held over linux like a gun in the Ballmer years. Its a reason Linux was stuck with 8.3 length filenames for so long.
When Apple was at death's door (around the arrival of OS X) they were very open about protocols and formats (e.g. JPG, mp3, ssh, whatever) and happily paid the Danegeld so their customers could encode mp3s and RTF files etc. They proclaimed how important open formats were and managed somehow to get unprotected files in their music store. I thought to myself that they would lose "religion" if they ever achieved any success and indeed, they don't really care so much. They don't even oppose it, just don't care.
So I wonder if this is MS seeing that exFat might be replaced just to save a few pennies of BOM cost and that they need to be in the thick of IoT things, having lost the embedded OS competition. And while exFat is hardly a big money earner, staying relevant matters. With linux beating Ones in the Azure cloud, every bit helps.
BTW I'm a long term apple user; my comments about the waxing and waning of their commitment to openness is a dispassionate observation.
How so? I never had that problem.
I guess I never noticed a problem because either I mostly use ext3/4, or I am so used to using legally dubious drivers that I forgot they were there.
I mean, who ever gives you a FAT formatted disk? I don't have floppy drive anyway :p
More info at: https://fossbytes.com/fat32-vs-ntfs-vs-exfat-difference-thre...
If I was a betting type, I'd wager that Microsoft's FAT patents (and various legal settlements where they got to say "Linux infringes on hundreds of patents" without ever needing to specify the patents) had a lot to do with that change, since, with the exception of a few manufacturers who continued to ship devices with external SD slots, and USB-OTG which is kind of a bonus feature, Android finally didn't need FAT for interoperability.
Most USB flash disks I've seen (and I've seen many) are even nowadays mostly FAT32. "Portable drives" aka USB-to-SATA are shipped preformatted to NTFS, and only with the advent of SDXC did preformatted exFAT start to appear.
(It has to do with driver support, I would guess - exFAT works in Win7+, but as long as the world runs on WinXP kiosks (ugh), vendors go with the lowest common denominator. Note that a flash disk will go places - what's your car entertainment system running? Linux? Android? Windows CE? Anfient Embedded Monftrofity? Will it support exFAT? Unlikely.)
If OSX and EFI had out of the box support for Linux filesystems we could at least stop using FAT on pendrives. I personally will look forward to that.
As well, if you ever look at a live-CD (like the installers for most modern Linux distros are), it will usually be using SYSLINUX, which limits itself to 8.3 filenames, for various good reasons to do with floppies, PXE, and ISO9660. Mount an Ubuntu CD in Windows and you'll see them.
I.e. my EDC flash disk has FAT32-formatted first partition, yet is bootable. This is surprisingly versatile.
Actually UEFI REQUIRES the bootable partition to be FAT (not not exFAT).
UEFI also requires the executables to be in the COFF format ( instead of the normal ELF one ) too.
I'm not sure what's the expiry on 2008 submission.