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