SFC Considers Combining ZFS With Linux A GPL Violation

[liam]

Right, however OpenZFS on Linux does not use Linux kernel interfaces. Its authors went to considerable lengths to avoid using them, they only use standard interfaces i.e. EXPORT_SYMBOL . For any work which requires use of actual Linux interfaces they employ user mode binaries, with possibly addition of additional kernel code licensed under GPL .

This isn't anything to do with zfs. The poster was asking about a closed source (the important point!) private copyright code. This wouldn't apply to the zfs module.

To everyone else:
I don't know the lawyers' reasoning, so please stop asking me about hypothetical situations.
IANAL!!!!

[duby229]

So now in hurd you have no drivers. No frustration!

The biggest fallacy in the GPL mindset is that people assume that corporation will publish their code in GPL to use GPL libs, whereas in practice they just rewrite the whole stuff in proprietary or with BSD libraries.

I just can't understand why the BSD's don't understand how harmful that is. It hurts them worse I think.

EDIT: You think everything would be peaches and creme without the GPL, but I don't think linux would have survived without the copyleft at its essence. And now the linux community must be one of the largest collaborations in the world.

[pal666]

You're not technically wrong about ZFS not having b-trees, but your fanboi leaked through. The idea of b-trees certainly was around when ZFS was being designed and they made a conscious decision to use the slab approach. A decent info spec on the differences is here. It's just a different way of doing COW.

isn't it funny that misinformed people choose freebsd? here is some education for you and four other people.
ohad rodeh's paper which mentions zfs while you say "certainly was around when ZFS was being designed and they made a conscious decision to use the slab approach". http://liw.fi/larch/ohad-btrees-shadowing-clones.pdf no, cow btrees were not invented yet.
comparison by one of ex-zfs engineers https://lwn.net/Articles/342892/
i even quote relevant part to make it less of tl;dr for you
"In my opinion, the basic architecture of btrfs is more suitable to storage than that of ZFS. One of the major problems with the ZFS approach - "slabs" of blocks of a particular size - is fragmentation. Each object can contain blocks of only one size, and each slab can only contain blocks of one size. You can easily end up with, for example, a file of 64K blocks that needs to grow one more block, but no 64K blocks are available, even if the file system is full off nearly empty slabs of 512 byte blocks, 4K blocks, 128K blocks, etc. To solve this problem, we (the ZFS developers) invented ways to create big blocks out of little blocks ("gang blocks") and other unpleasant workarounds. In our defense, at the time btrees and extents seemed fundamentally incompatible with copy-on-write, and the virtual memory metaphor served us well in many other respects. In contrast, the items-in-a-btree approach is extremely space efficient and flexible. Defragmentation is an ongoing process - repacking the items efficiently is part of the normal code path preparing extents to be written to disk. Doing checksums, reference counting, and other assorted metadata busy-work on a per-extent basis reduces overhead and makes new features (such as fast reverse mapping from an extent to everything that references it) possible." (in contrast... part applies to btrfs)

btw, last time i checked, zfs was still not able to resize itself(no, resising only in one direction does not count - otherwise all people could fly, only downwards)

[pal666]

GPL-compatible or not, OpenZFS is free software

until it combined with gpl2 kernel. nobody is opposing its source distribution

[pal666]

Huh? The GPL has nothing to do with users.

did you even read it?

Baloney! GPL is all about stealing a developers code. It highly restricts how one can use open code and does so in a way that damages the development process.

i see by "developers" you mean "idiots who want to take code written by others and make it proprietary and give nothing in return". that is stealing and that is forbidden by gpl. please show us non-gpl alternative to linux kernel with non-damaged development process

[pal666]

Can't Canonical just "compile" the module during the install? Include a check box for ZFS support. Doesn't this get past the "distributed with" restriction if it's compiled on-site?

yes it can

[pal666]

Meanwhile Android is chock-full of closed-source kernel drivers and large companies -- with, you know, actual assets -- don't seem to care much.

did you miss your medication intake and confuse kernel with userspace?

[pal666]

Or the other side could just admit that they aren't highly social philanthropists who care about justice, freedom and universal brotherhood, stop propagating their bloody fascist ideals and crawl back into the same hole they, the Tea Party movement and the Berniecrats emerged from.

why would kernel developers do all that things in reaction to some idiots not liking their license?

[pal666]

For one, nvidia.ko cannot be compiled on user machine, because it is never distributed in the source form. Its source is nVidia's proprietary IP. It is merely installed, just the same as kernel is. Secondly, just as nVidia goes to length to avoid any use of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL kernel symbols (which is enforced by kernel module loader), so does ZFS on Linux (which is very easy to verify, because ZOL sources are actually available at github). Which means that both nvidia.ko and ZOL are not bound by GPL license when calling into kernel. I do not think that Conservancy has a leg to stand on, unless they actually know any EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL symbol used by ZOL (in which case a patch will be welcome, to remove the dependency)

garbage in - garbage out. nvidia.ko is compiled on user machine from binary windows driver and open wrapper.

[pal666]

zfsonlinux.org's FAQ claims that distributing a loadable kernel module is both GPL and CDDL compliant.

Either SFC made a mistake in their claim or they're trying to scare Canonical from including ZFS in Ubuntu or trying to motivate Oracle to re-license ZFS under GPL.

zfsonlinux.org's FAQ made a mistake. i give more trust to sfc and all other corporate linux lawyers