This is such an odd article. Perhaps Paragon isn't being entirely altruistic with this move but TR are being quite scathing of someone's work submitting a kernel driver with no direct financial reward - and no real praise for, hopefully, fixing one of the biggest out-of-the-box gripes that Windows / Linux desktop dual-boot environments have. It's no small wonder people often complain about the hardships of writing and maintaining open-source software!
Yeah, The Register can often be witty and irreverent, and I wouldn't complain about that, but that kind of wit only works if there's an actual point behind it. Jumping on the apparently popular bandwagon of squeezing out "drama" from the Linux kernel mailing list isn't adding anything of value.
It also seems a bit ignorant to call the submission "half-baked" just because it needed to be worked on and because someone pointed that out (also) in a slightly irreverent way.
All of those points you bring up about the feedback they got seem like just business as usual for a larger merge of code to a carefully developed FOSS project.
I think the issue here is the context... Paragon has had a rocky relationship with the Linux community in the past, for example their whiny reaction to exFAT being proposed for mainline a few months ago, so I think in the eyes of The Register there is a certain amount of inherent mistrust in Paragon proposing their NTFS driver for the kernel---shortly after going on the offensive against another formerly-commercial FS going mainline.
That said, I think the tension is more imagined than real, as the LKML doesn't really seem to have responded any more negatively than they do to most other patches.
There's no big issue, and there hasn't been one for many years. Ext2/3/4fs read/write support has existed for a long time for Windows, and FUSE/Dokan has a working NTFS driver with r/w support as well (also for a long time). It just doesn't work out of the box (though it does on some distributions).
Its gonna take a while till this driver is mainline in Linux kernel, and till that Linux kernel is included in distributions (especially LTS).
I haven't read The Register article, but in the past it has come to my attention they dramatize their articles, and I don't want to read such media.
