OpenZFS Launches To Promote Open-Source ZFS

[johnc]

Not impossible , just illegal to ship together.

Yeah... but nobody can really explain why. "Because the FSF says so" seems like a substandard argument.

[xeekei]

Btrfs will continue to live. IMHO Btrfs has a much better design than ZFS.

Interesting. Could you elaborate, please?

[prodigy_]

Wayland, X and Mesa aren't GPL licensed.

Yes, it's very unfortunate that Wayland is MIT licensed. The developers clearly made a mistake (LGPLv2 would be a much better choice) and their mistake will become a genuine issue somewhere down the road. So I see Wayland only as interim solution on the way to a GPL-ed display server.

X predates GPL and is irrelevant at this point.

Mesa is being developed by corporations and it's no secret that corporations hate GPL and are afraid of it. Mostly because they hate everything they cannot control and abuse. Mesa is lesser evil than closed source binary blobs but nothing more than that.

[Ramiliez]

Yeah... but nobody can really explain why. "Because the FSF says so" seems like a substandard argument.

Well SUN specifically designed CDDL to be incopatible with GPL

[erendorn]

Yes, it's very unfortunate that Wayland is MIT licensed. The developers clearly made a mistake (LGPLv2 would be a much better choice) and their mistake will become a genuine issue somewhere down the road. So I see Wayland only as interim solution on the way to a GPL-ed display server.

X predates GPL and is irrelevant at this point.

Either these two paragraphs contradict each other, or the timeframe by which the MIT choice becomes an issue is much longer than the existence of X or the GPL, making these supposed "issues" irrelevant anyway.

Notwithstanding the fact you don't even begin to explain why it is a mistake, an issue, or unfortunate.

[benmoran]

Interesting. Could you elaborate, please?

http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

An older article from someone who worked on ZFS for a few years at Sun. He raises a few points about why the btrfs design is better.

[Vim_User]

Yes, it's very unfortunate that Wayland is MIT licensed. The developers clearly made a mistake (LGPLv2 would be a much better choice) and their mistake will become a genuine issue somewhere down the road. So I see Wayland only as interim solution on the way to a GPL-ed display server.

Feel free to start coding a GPL-ed display server.

Mesa is being developed by corporations and it's no secret that corporations hate GPL and are afraid of it. Mostly because they hate everything they cannot control and abuse. Mesa is lesser evil than closed source binary blobs but nothing more than that.

Feel free to start coding a GPL-ed Mesa replacement.

[jayrulez]

Yes, it's very unfortunate that Wayland is MIT licensed. The developers clearly made a mistake (LGPLv2 would be a much better choice) and their mistake will become a genuine issue somewhere down the road. So I see Wayland only as interim solution on the way to a GPL-ed display server.

X predates GPL and is irrelevant at this point.

So X predates GPL and is near EOL according to some people yet it has not been "jailed" (turned into a proprietary project that killed the open source project) as some people would put it . This is proof that a GPL license is not necessary for the longevity of a project. Do you see how you are contradicting yourself?

Mesa is being developed by corporations and it's no secret that corporations hate GPL and are afraid of it. Mostly because they hate everything they cannot control and abuse. Mesa is lesser evil than closed source binary blobs but nothing more than that.

Is that so? Corporations have a hand in the development of most important FOSS projects today. Linux, GCC, Clang, LLVM, Wayland, X, Mesa and many others get a significant portion of their contributions from corporations.

Fun fact: Almost 90% of Linux kernel contributions come from corporations today. So remove all corporate contributions and you'll see how far many FOSS and GPL projects go.

[xeekei]

http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

An older article from someone who worked on ZFS for a few years at Sun. He raises a few points about why the btrfs design is better.

That was very interesting, thank you. Everyone talks about ZFS like it's a gift from the gods, which made me think Btrfs wouldn't stand a chance. Now I think differently. Can't wait for Btrfs!

[ryao]

A BSD-licence means it would be able to ship with the upstream kernel? Sweet. I just wonder what would happen to Btrfs if ZFS suddenly became available to everyone on Linux.

The problem is Linus Torvalds, not licensing. Linus has an irrational fear that Oracle's lawyers will find some way to sue Linux users if he merges ZFS.

With that said, ZFS is better off outside Linus' tree. The /dev/zfs interface is currently not stable, so putting ZFS into Linus' tree would be a recipe for problems because the tools and kernel module would easily become out of sync. At some point, ZFSOnLinux and Open ZFS will agree on a way to stabilize the interface enough that innovation can happen without sacrificing old tools. Until then, living outside of Linus' tree will allow the system package manager to mitigate synchronization issues and is probably best for everyone.

Not impossible , just illegal to ship together.

First, there is a distinction between a GPL violation and violation of a law. One breaks a legal contract and can result in a lawsuit. Another breaks a statute and can result in jailtime.

It is not a GPL violation to ship a CDDL-licensed Linux kernel module. Plenty of people do it, including Oracle. It is a GPL violation to ship CDDL-licensed code linked into the Linux kernel binary. Few filesystems are shipped that way. I suspect that this is a problem for less than 1% of Linux users.

Well SUN specifically designed CDDL to be incopatible with GPL

My general understanding of Sun's decision not to use the GPL for Open Solaris is that it had problems. Sun was able to open source >99% of Solaris, but there were bits that it could not open source because they belonged to others. Sun wanted others to be able to make changes to their stuff and ship it. Placing its stuff under the GPL would have made anyone doing this in violation of the GPL because they lacked sources to the blobs that they had to ship. In addition, anyone doing that would have been open to lawsuits for patent violations. These things made the GPL unsuitable for Open Solaris, which is why Sun created the CDDL. Oracle would have been in a position to sue both Illumos and Open ZFS out of existence had Sun went with the GPL. However, there is little Oracle can do because Sun created the CDDL.

With that said, neither of us are lawyers. However, I find the idea that Sun created the GPL out of some irrational desire to avoid the GPL to be incredible given the negative consequences of licensing Open Solaris under the GPL.