fedora official ntfs support

Szakacsits Szabolcs szaka at sienet.hu
Thu Jan 15 16:50:17 UTC 2004


On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Marc Schwartz wrote:

> My perspective on this is that Red Hat, and by association Fedora,

Your perspective is very reasonable but do you represent Red Hat or
Fedora? Honestly, I really don't know. 

> represents a potential target for litigation regarding the inclusion of
> non-FOSS components (ie. NTFS, MP3, etc). 

MP3 is patented, NTFS is unknown.

> That litigation could be based upon patent/intellectual property
> issues and/or data loss/integrity issues, since the NTFS drivers are
> considered "experimental".

Please read the url I've sent or see the maintained driver documentation.
The old driver write support isn't "experimental", it's _broken_.
The new driver is ... quoting from the 2.6.1 kernel source [or
2.4 backported driver],

    "we have so far not received a single report where the driver would 
    have damaged someones data so we assume it is perfectly safe to use.

    Note:  While write support is safe in this version (a rewrite from
    scratch of the NTFS support), it should be noted that the old NTFS
    write support, included in Linux 2.5.10 and before (since 1997),
    is not safe."

> Get over it and move on.

I'm afraid Red Hat, Fedora users won't get it over until an official
statement is made.

	Szaka





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