The development of the open source NTFS driver has a long history with significant
contributions from many people.
The original project was Linux based, establish in 1995 and led by Martin von Loewis to the end of the nineties. This driver supported NT4 NTFS, had close to full functionality but it was experimental. The driver was abandoned by its developers around the time when Windows 2000 was released with a new and improved NTFS version. Unfortunately the driver did not check the NTFS version, and failed to deny mounting the unknown, new NTFS version, which led to countless fatal corruptions and left a stain on the NTFS driver's reputation.
The project was saved by Anton Altaparmakov who, in 2000, took over the maintenance, and decided to rewrite the driver and the user space utilities from scratch to also include support for the new NTFS versions. He was helped by Richard Russon in the early years.
In 2002 Szabolcs Szakacsits joined the project and engineered ntfsresize which was the first open source NTFS software capable of heavy NTFS metadata modifications safely. Today ntfsresize is widely used in numerous partitioners, imagers and operating system installers.
The next major step towards improved NTFS write functionality was the authoring of ntfsmount by Yura Pakhuchiy, who entered the project in 2004. Ntfsmount uses Miklos Szeredi's groundbreaking File system in User space (FUSE) development framework. Ntfsmount could modify any ordinary file, supported symbolic links, device files, FIFOs, sockets and it even had rudimentary file and directory creation, deletion and renaming support.
In 2005, the project members agreed to dual licence their NTFS work in favour of Apple hiring Anton Altaparmakov to work on read-write NTFS support for Mac OS X, and the new code would be contributed back, which sadly never happened. Thankfully Szabolcs Szakacsits kept working on the open source driver, and on 14th of July in 2006 released NTFS-3G, a full read-write NTFS driver which was a major functional and quality improvement. The feedback was incredibly positive, thus the rapid stabilization process resulted a fairly high adaption rate by end-users and in several fields of the computing industry. Stable NTFS-3G was released in early 2007. The driver was available for FreeBSD, NetBSD, Haiku and Mac OS X as well shortly afterwards. Three years later, Apple still didn't complete the in-house developed NTFS driver, nor contributed back anything.
The official establishment of the NTFS-3G project aims to address the support needs and to foster the further development of the open source NTFS driver.
