Comment 4 for bug 1641104

From that bug:

"I believe you are correct. Licensing is not an issue for the GParted application because GParted would simply call external exFAT tools. I do not think a simple call to an external tool constitutes a violation of the licensing agreement.

However, this would not be the case with the GParted Live CD image. GParted Live includes all the necessary software to use all of the features of GParted. Due to licensing constraints, we would not be able to include exFAT tools in the image (i.e., without having paid for the appropriate license). ;-("

So, it appears that the functionality is able to be included into Gparted without licensing issues, but that it isn't included due to maintaining consistency with Gparted Live. Additionally:

"If all of the major GNU/Linux distributions were distributing the ability to create exFAT file systems, then I would consider doing the same with GParted and GParted Live."

As Jan has pointed out: "It seems like exfat-utils is included in Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux and probably other distros currently, so I think it would make sense now to support exFAT when these are available?"

So, therefore, exfat-utils is indeed available in other distros, not *all* of the major ones yet (most notably RedHat/Fedora), but a considerable amount of them.

I think slapping on a "won't fix" is therefore premature, and we should await the response of the Debian and Gparted developers on that bug.