NTFS driver (was: ReactOS GPL vs. proprietary drivers)

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Jan Kratochvil wrote:

> I consider NTFS problem a special case.

Probably because you consider NTFS as the product of the "evil empire",
not as a matured technology designed/developed by experienced
professionals and used over a hundred millions of computers today ;)
 
> NTFS has no meaning as a standalone filesystem - there are better GPL

Why not? NTFS has all the features that other Linux filesystems have and
even more. Why couldn't it be used as a standalone filesystem? 

Let me tell an example, the (Linux) NTFS driver supports transparent
compression. Today CPU's are very fast and the disk bandwidth is very 
slow compared. So doing bulk data transfers, the disk bandwidth is the
bootleneck. Would you be faster using the filesystem's transparent
compression? In theory yes, CPU can [de]compress when transfering data 
and you must also transfer less data. No main Linux fs supports this,
hopefully Reiser4 will in the future ... (there was hope for e2compr as
well for many years but it didn't work out after all).

> high performance mature filesystems such as ext3. NTFS for GNU/Linux
> OS has its only meaning as a temporary compatibility hack.

You mean just like the fat driver, samba, wine, etc? They make things to
work together. You have the source, you can port it to other OS'es, fix
bugs, improve it, etc.

> Paragon http://www.ntfs-linux.com/ really supports r/w NTFS for
> GNU/Linux (thanks for reference) but it is a commercial closed-source
> (*) product and it is even an IMO dangerous way to modify your NTFS
> drives due to the reverse-engineering disadvantages described above.

I don't think Paragon reverse engineered the NTFS driver but licensed the
technology from Microsoft. SDK, documents, whatever.
 
> > But I could imagine one isn't allowed to use ntfs.sys, ntoskrnl.exe
> > the way he/she wants legally.
>
> Applicable laws vary in different countries - legal analysis for major
> countries would be welcome. I have an affirmation of the professional
> IT lawyer JUDr. Jiri Cermak Captive NTFS is legally valid at least in
> my home country.

IMHO today definitely but AFAIK your country will become part of the EU
next year and the patent laws are just discussed nowadays (it doesn't look
too promising). This may or may not be related using ntfs.sys legally
outside of Windows. Also, there is actually any patent issue?

	Szaka