[Techtalk] writing to ntfs?

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Saturday 07 February 2004 08:10, Tracey Clark wrote:
> In response to Rasjid:
> "But in 99% of the cases where
> someone is going to use it, they _will_ already have Windows installed on
> the same system, and so the licensing issue is not really a huge problem.
>  (Why else would you have an NTFS partition around?)"
>
> Unfortunately, there are people who will burn copies of legal or
> illegally cracked versions of Windows for other people. There are
> countries where there is no such thing as copyright and so copying
> software is more common, and there are websites with software from those
> countries (Russia is an example). So, there are various ways to have an
> NTFS partition lying around from an unlicensed version of Windows. In the
> US (I can't speak for how it works in other countries), you need to pay
> for a license for Windows per their licensing agreement to use it
> legally.

Sure, there are plenty of people with unlicensed copies of Windows.  However, 
I think my argument still holds, with the following details added for 
clarity:

* Please who want to use Captive to access a NTFS partition will almost always 
a copy of Windows installed on their machine.
* Either this copy of Windows will have a license, or it will not.
* If it does have a license, then they can almost certainly legally (IANAL!) 
copy a couple of Windows executables onto some other part of their computer.
* If it does _not_ have a license, then they can illegally copy these said 
files to somewhere else on their computer.  But since they already have an 
entire Windows system illegally on their computer, the said user is unlikely 
to feel that an extra copy of a couple of illegal files is a big problem.  
Maybe when copying the said files over to Linux they will get an attack of 
the guilts, and say 'Well, in doing this I should really purchase the Windows 
2000 license now' but I just don't see it happening.

So I stand by my assertion that it is _not_ a big issue for the _user_ that 
Captive relies on the given Windows executables.

However, as I previously stated, it is an big issue for the people who put 
together Redhat, SuSE, Debian etc, which is, now that I think about it, 
probably why the Captive project gets less exposure than the Linux-NTFS 
project, since it is basically not possible to place the former directly into 
a Linux distribution, whereas once the latter works NTFS support would work 
'out of the box'.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net