I didn't say you should copy/paste the driver.
But by all means, using it as a reference and writing an identically functioning driver is 100% legal.
Hence I don't get the point of having "Experts" in FAT come and write an independent driver, or use some other non-Windows driver as reference/source.
In fact, legally, I move that if ReactOS were to strip out 70% of the FastFAT code (totally likely, since the driver is legitimately bloated for things ReactOS doesn't even need to worry about yet), you could add the other 30% *as is*.
I believe this work was already started by one of Aleksey's russian guys, but seems to have been dropped...
On 29-Jul-09, at 4:47 PM, Steven Edwards wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Alex Ionescuionucu@videotron.ca wrote:
I'm still at a loss as to why you are all ignoring the free, open source, FastFAT driver in the Microsoft WDK.
Speaking just for myself, its not clear to me what in the aggregate of the WDK is actually 'free' and which is just there for reference purposes. I mean it could be perfectly fine and dandy for us to use it, but without the ablity to do proper due diligence, it does not seem to be worth it. Given the history of the fat patent mess, this should seem perfectly clear.
Until Microsoft has the desire to clearly lay out for us what is safe to use in an open source project and what is not, I don't see why its worth the risk.
-- Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Best regards, Alex Ionescu