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John Paul Wohlscheid over at It's FOSS takes a look at the ZFS file system and its capabilities. He mainly covers OpenZFS which is the fork made since Oracle bought and shut down Solaris which was the original host of ZFS. It features pooled storage with RAID-like capabilities, copy-on-write with snapshots, data integrity verification and automatic repair, and it can handle files up to 16 exabytes in size, with file systems of up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes in size should you have enough electricity to pull that off. Because it started development under a deliberately incompatible license, ZFS cannot be directly integrated in Linux. However, several distros work around that and provide packages for it. It has been ported to FreeBSD since 2008.
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:27PM (1 child)
GPL is absolutely a contract which grants you a copyright license as part of its terms. You receive the valuable consideration of the right to distribute a copyrighted work quid pro quo you agree to take certain required actions in exchange. IE in order to distribute binaries, you are required to distribute (or offer in some cases) the corresponding source code. If you refuse to accept the agreement by violating its terms, you lose the benefits afforded you by accepting the agreement and are therefore distributing a copyrighted work without a license to do so, in violation of copyright law.
Only half of that is a valid argument in court. Distributing, yes. You're a copyright pirating scoundrel. Using, nope. You are not required to accept the GPL to make use of software licensed under it. Whoever gave you the copy was required to do so in compliance with the license terms (thus accepting the agreement that granted them the license to distribute), and you must do likewise if you make a copy and give it to someone. For use on your own systems in your own environments, no license is required, and GPL doesn't apply to ANYTHING you do. If you read GPLv2 word for word, there isn't a single term which requires anything of an end user who is NOT distributing a copy of the software to a third party. It's impossible to violate the GPL exclusively on your own system.
The waters get muddy with GPLv3 where making a web app available over a network is considered a "distribution" of it, in part on the basis that any HTML, CSS, etc. contained in it is copyrighted and would require the benefit of the GPL license in order for you to distribute that to another user's web browser. Linux kernel is GPLv2, so that's not relevant to the ZFS case.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:54PM
At least one court agrees with you that it is a contract.
If that was its intent, then it should be called an agreement rather than a license. The license (eg permission) is granted as a condition of an agreement.
The word license means permission.
I understand that distributing is the context that everyone talks about the GPL. That wouldn't stop someone for suing you over linking, even if you win the lawsuit. Even if you are correct and vindicated.
I'll point to one example I remember. In the MySQL days, some time back. The DB server is GPL licensed, no problem. But . . . all drivers and connectors to it were also GPL licensed. Not LGPL but GPL. Commercial developers might like to use MySQL. So they all had various ways of dancing around it. One that I learned of was they don't distribute the MySQL driver with their product. Instead the have the customer install the product and separately install the database driver. Thus the "linking", in any sense of the word, was done by the customer. If the vendor distributed the MySQL driver at all, it was strictly under GPL terms and unrelated to the product they sold. It is something I considered doing a long time ago, but decided not to go that route. It was clear that the copyright owner definitely considered this a violation of the GPL even if most open source people did not. Reading the copyright owner's licensing description made it clear that they viewed it this way -- even if they were being deceptive or confused. They wanted to sell a commercial license to commercial developers. It's not worth getting sued over. I don't think it is a problem today.
I think GPLv3 is a mess. Way unnecessarily complex. I could easily read and understand the GPLv2 as I think most people could. The LGPLv3 is even worse -- in complexity -- because you first have to understand the GPLv3 in order to then understand what the LGPLv3 relaxes. I understand that Stallman wants to prevent Tivoization. And I applaud his efforts in the GPL and LGPL which effectively did prevent the Microsoftization of open source because of its viral nature.
Don't even get started about the AGPL. The purpose of AGPL, prior to GPLv3, was to make a web app be "distribution" effectively. Even code that you did not distribute into the browser. For example, you could not use an AGPL licensed library in your server, even if that library has no code that ever leaves the server.
My understanding of Linux + ZFS is this: technically it should be okay. At least Linus says that's his interpretation. But he cannot bind others to that. So a distribution needs to get the end user to link ZFS into the kernel at runtime. I think this is an even more dangerous situation than the MySQL (GPL) driver separately installed into a vendor's product by the customer. Reason is because the distribution is distributing both the ZFS and Linux, they're just not being linked together until runtime -- but the clear intent of the distribution is for it to be linked together. And it is not Oracle to worry about, it is a kernel developer or their estate.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.