Concerns Raised Over The "New" NTFS Linux Driver That Merged Last Year

[F.Ultra]

Konstantin Komarov is a slavic name. While Paragon's Head Office is situated in Germany, Paragon also has offices in the US, Russia and Japan.

There could be a very obvious reason that Mr. Komarov isn't responsive right now. This reason can incidentally also be quite orthogonal to the legitimate concerns of the kernel developers.

Would have agree with others, given the surname, there is a good chance the dev is cut off by sanctions or have more pressing issues to deal with than replying to emails; like trying to survive.

He is not some random from home developer, he is the founder and CEO of Paragon. Also this silence have been going on for 6 months which means that it have nothing to do with the current situation. That said however, looking at their web site there have been no updates to their blog, any press release or any other news item for 6 months either so it's like the whole company have gone silent since November 2021.

edit: their official YouTube channel have a video from 3 months ago so not completely silent, it was in Chinese though so...

[sinepgib]

one thing i've learned about open source projects that so many people use it simply as a tool for free labor. either use the ideology behind open source to rile people up to get them to willing to work on something for free while you sit back and soak in the free labor or just release something as open source to wash their hands clean and walk away. leaving it up to other people.

And has the double standard of only being angry when it's a corporation who does that.

Konstantin Komarov is a slavic name. While Paragon's Head Office is situated in Germany, Paragon also has offices in the US, Russia and Japan.

There could be a very obvious reason that Mr. Komarov isn't responsive right now. This reason can incidentally also be quite orthogonal to the legitimate concerns of the kernel developers.

Ohhh, that's a very interesting observation!

Just like I said corporations care about Open Source only when it means more profits one way or another. Rewriting the Windows NTFS driver for Linux (the underlying APIs are wildly different, so porting is not an option) doesn't mean any additional profits or goodwill for Microsoft considering ntfs-3g already exists.

BTW, ntfs-3g can also be considered a dead project. It's not seen any major fixes/new features for at least a couple of years now. It doesn't need any maintenance though considering FUSE unlike the Linux kernel offers stable APIs (it's all in userspace).

And to be entirely fair, most users aren't any different than companies in that regard. They "love" open source when it's a freebie, but are reluctant to give back in any way.
Regarding FUSE filesystems and the need of maintenance, they may not bit rot, but filesystems evolve (so feature work is valuable) and bugs exist in all software (and fixes are needed), so it's not as it really can remain static without harm to users.

Gotta say, NTFS-3g is basically fine for most people I think. The performance is good, and I doubt there are many demanding NTFS as a boot volume filesystem on Linux.

I used to have most of the user data folders shared with Windows by making symlinks, and I'd rather have performance in line with that I get with native filesystems for that. I don't use Windows that much anymore so I no longer do stuff like that, but I don't think it's such a weird use and could really benefit from this driver.

It could be one of these "the maintainer currently has to deal with personal/health/life issues" things and he'll become responsive again, once he's better. Wouldn't be the first time someone behind an opensource project goes missing for a few weeks without any warning/notice and then returns.

Entirely possible and understandable, but it's good etiquette for either the company or the person to give a prompt notice that they need vacations from the maintainer role and expect to go back at some point. Or if the latter can't be done, for the company to appoint someone else.

"ghosting all of us"? The fuck is wrong with you? Paragon has given us a great working driver which needs minor fixes here and there. OK, Konstantin has stepped away from maintaining it, so fucking what? No one in the fucking community can step up? Just "I vote to remove"?

For years the whole community asked for a native driver, the one was given with no strings attached, oh, god, no one actually cares or wants to continue developing it.

Just like two years ago Linus removed the console scrollback buffer in the kernel and ... while hundreds of people lamented it, the feature has not been reimplemented and no one effectively gave a fuck.

Again, the open source community is either corporations which use it to extract profits or freeloaders who claim they love Open Source while doing effectively nothing for it, not even contributing financially.

I'm sure as hell, we'd had volunteers willing to do the work, had it been paid. Alas, in the magical Open Source land things appear out of thin air. Oh, wait, they don't.

Keep on churning accusations against ... Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, etc. etc. etc. Just never look in the mirror.

Oh, Paragon are such saints. I agree that it's extra comfy to just pretend somebody owes as anything, but mainlining is something that requires commitment, period. It adds maintenance work to the regular contributors, and it's the general policy that sending patches makes you the maintainer. I talk from experience here, I made a small path for the MTD subsystem and then had to review a few changes to that code. And it's fine, because that's the commitment I made when I sent them.
So, in this case, both parties (entitled users and Paragon) are in the wrong. Ones expect freebies and the others made a code dump and didn't keep the maintenance promise they made to the other mainline developers.
Now, eggs were broken, either we want the code and do something about it or we accept the loss because we don't want to give anything back, but we shut up about it because we're as much abandoning the driver as Paragon is.
Note I do agree Paragon doesn't owe us users anything. But there is an implicit contract with the other developers when they attempt getting their code upstream that they'll keep maintaining it, so they owe other developers that.

NTFS and exFAT are both Microsofts file systems. Microsoft is developing them, Microsoft is deciding where to take them, so they should maintain a driver for it. Especially since they are so vocal telling everybody how the love Linux and OSS now.

Oh, so the Linux Foundation should be writing support for btrfs and ext4 for all other OSes, right?
That is nonsense. Shit on Microsoft where it's due, but their only obligation here is to maintain Windows' versions. They don't benefit at all from this support, while Paragon does.

Well, then fork the thing, dump the unmaintained code and when Paragon came back from all that snorting with "escorts", tell then to pound sand.

Or go the sane route you use for everything else, which is marking orphaned and give a fixed number of releases for somebody to step up. If nobody does, remove it. It doesn't make sense to harm users to make a point.

This imho shows, why Microsofts apparent support for OSS is only hollow marketing for the masses and for maintaining an image, and has not led for any actions and changes outside some of their unimportant side projects which they don't rely on. At places where they could help Linux, which they claim to love, they rely on 3rd-parties to do their work for them (NTFS, exFAT) instead of contribuiting directly, and their "support" consists of nothing but not suing and not enforcing patents.

Microsoft has exactly zero to do with this. Paragon is an independent company that provided a paid service to support these filesystems. Microsoft never promised support for their filesystems anywhere else than Windows.

[Trevelyan]

Would have agree with others, given the surname, there is a good chance the dev is cut off by sanctions or have more pressing issues to deal with than replying to emails; like trying to survive.

[middy]

one thing i've learned about open source projects that so many people use it simply as a tool for free labor. either use the ideology behind open source to rile people up to get them to willing to work on something for free while you sit back and soak in the free labor or just release something as open source to wash their hands clean and walk away. leaving it up to other people.

[bug77]

Agreed. Other valid complaints:

* Still no NTFS utility source despite claims that it's coming. FS utilities are a very important part of being a supported filesystem in the mainline kernel. How are you supposed to check the filesystem without the utilities?
* Maintainer (Komarov) doesn't review patches - they either directly apply them or ignore them.
* The maintainer doesn't send their own patches for review either - they just directly apply them to their tree. They also don't submit PRs for the work they've done. Everyone who writes code in the kernel needs to get someone else to sign off.
* Basically nothing's made it into the kernel for 6+ months despite other people trying to contribute and submit patches because this person is the official maintainer and isn't following protocol or communicating.
* Maintainer can't handle things like branching and tagging in git to version and mark stable points.

Nobody wants to get tossed into the middle of someone else's work and made responsible for it, and that's what Paragon has done. I mean, props for finally contributing the driver and accommodating the kernel dev requests to get it mainlined. It was a milestone. But the job isn't done, and whoever's de-prioritized this at Paragon needs a reality check. Which is hopefully coming, now that there's some attention on their bad communication skills. Nothing like getting your company name in the news for code littering to clean up your act.

Yeah, that Home is why I'm still on ext4: fancy features mean nothing when I can't retrieve my data from something gone wrong.

[Shagga, Son of Dolf]

So, to follow your logic, others should be able to tell *you* how to spend your revenue (income)?

No. But should stop their hypocrite marketing "we love OSS" bullshit. Because they don't.

[brucethemoose]

Gotta say, NTFS-3g is basically fine for most people I think. The performance is good, and I doubt there are many demanding NTFS as a boot volume filesystem on Linux.

Maybe for read only mounts. But I get corrupted files whenever I do a bunch of writing.


Winbtrfs work better for me, but it doesn't let you write to a Windows C: drive, and its performance isnt very good (albeit still much better than ntfs-3g).

[cjcox]

Maybe we could associate them as a distant relative of Hans Reiser, then their code could be pulled and never be allowed back in?

[unsound]

NTFS-3G is known to corrupt volumes when downloading torrents. Maybe it's a very special use case, I dunno.

I don't think it is, many people use torrents. Has it been reported to the mailing list or in a github issue? I can't see it in the list of open issues on github. It's certainly worth investigating as it sounds quite serious.

[Nuc!eoN]

I do not see the issue, at least the way it is presented here.

Sure maybe there haven't been updates to the code in quite some time, but are there any inherent issues with the code itself?

If a software works as intended/does a good job, I will choose it over software that is "maintained" but worse.

I don't disagree that unmaintained code is not ideal, but also this is open source community code and not corporation shit.

I do not see a reason for removal, unless there are some hard issues. Everybody can choose wether to compile the feature or exclude it from compilation.

NTFS3G or whatever it is called is certainly not a better alternative, so not sure how dissmissing such a great and valuable contribution by Paragon would be a good idea.