It's Free Software of course, and it only took me about two weeks to do so.
Since I've been doing it in my limited spare time, I might as well brag about it and say that, had I been able to work on this full time (which I sure wouldn't mind), it probably wouldn't have taken more than 7 days... Can't help but wonder how much a proprietary/non-free software development workflow would have had to budget, or outsource, to try to achieve the same thing, within the same amount of time.
At the very least, this demonstrates that, if you start with the the right resource set and, more importantly, if you stop being irrational about how "using the GPLv3 means the death knell of your software revenue stream", a project such as this one can easily and cheaply be completed in a matter of days.
Anyway, the driver itself is read-only (which is all I need for Rufus, as my intent is to use it there) and it could probably use some more polishing/cleanup, but it is stable enough to be used right now.
So, if you are interested in a redistributable and 100% Free Software read-only NTFS EFI driver, you should visit:
https://efi.akeo.ie (the link includes pre-built binaries).
Alternatively, you can also visit the github project page at:
https://github.com/pbatard/efifs
Now, I'd be ungrateful if I didn't mention that the main reason I was able to get something off the ground this quickly is thanks to the awesome developers behind the GRUB 2.0 project, who abstracted their file system framework enough, to make reusing their code in an EFI implementation fairly straightforward.
And I also have to thank the iPXE developers, who did most of the back-breaking work in figuring out a GPL friendly version of an EFI FS driver, that I could build on.
Finally, I was also able to reuse some of the good work from the rEFInd people (the GPLv3 compatible parts), which was big help!
But the lesson is: Don't waste your time with proprietary/non-free software. If you are both interested in being productive and budget-conscious, Free Software is where it's at!
2014-06-30
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