"The intention is to compile this driver as an out-of-tree kernel module, without needing to copy it into the kernel source tree. That's why there's just a simple Makefile, and no other affordances for kernel inclusion. I can't really imagine any further need to build this driver into the kernel itself.

The last version of the driver that was included in the kernel, right up until it was removed, was version 3.04.

BUT, the author continued to develop the driver independently of kernel releases. In fact, the last known version of the driver was 4.04a, in 2000.

My goal is to continue maintaining this driver for modern kernel versions, 25 years after the last official release." - https://github.com/dbrant/ftape

and there have been continous ports since then: https://github.com/Godzil/ftape/tree/master - note the caveats which apparently all disappeared here...