[RFC] Remove NTFS kernel support

[Csaba Henk]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 05:27:40AM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 11:15:11AM +0100, Csaba Henk wrote:
> >yes, why so? FreeBSD has embraced recently a big chunk of CDDL'd code
> >without making much fuss about licensing, and for practical purposes,
> 
> If you're talking about either dtrace or ZFS:
> 1) The features are highly desirable and no more suitably licenced
>    alternative is available now or likely to become available in the
>    near future.

It's subjective how desirable something... it might make sense to claim
the above statement wrt. FUSE. OTOH, by "absolutely necessary" I
tought of something in the category of gcc/sshd/sendmail... Until
ZFS becomes the recommended filesystem for fresh FreeBSD installations,
I wouldn't put it into that category.

> 2) It is not part of the GENERIC system and will remain optional due to
>    the license.

It smells like apples and oranges to me... GENERIC is the name of the
default configuration for the _kernel_, isnt'it?

Wrt. FUSE, there was no mention of adding code to the kernel under other
license than BSD. The LGPL'd/GPL'd bits we discuss all belong to the
userspace. 

> 3) In the case of dtrace, licensing issues have delayed its implementation
>    by at least a year.

Well again, in case of FUSE, the userspace parts were not reimplemented,
they just needed some porting. The kernel module had no technical
problems due to licensing issues: it was written from scratch under a
BSD license (which in turn was first of all a purely technical
constraint due to the differences between the BSD and the Linux VFS),
except for the header fuse_kernel.h which was relicensed under a GPL/BSD
dual license by courtesy of Miklos Szeredi.

Regards,
Csaba