Mark J. Wielaard has written a brief blog post about a crucial license change for the dtrace performance analysis and troubleshooting tool. It has been available for most other systems, notably Solaris derivatives, FreeBSD, and OS X, but not for Linux. That may change soon, or at least have the possibility to change.
At Fosdem we had a talk on dtrace for linux in the Debugging Tools devroom.
Not explicitly mentioned in that talk, but certainly the most exciting thing, is that Oracle is doing a proper linux kernel port:
commit e1744f50ee9bc1978d41db7cc93bcf30687853e6
Author: Tomas Jedlicka <tomas.jedlicka@oracle.com>
Date: Tue Aug 1 09:15:44 2017 -0400dtrace: Integrate DTrace Modules into kernel proper
This changeset integrates DTrace module sources into the main kernel source tree under the GPLv2 license. Sources have been moved to appropriate locations in the kernel tree.
That is right, dtrace dropped the CDDL and switched to the GPL!
This change improves the utility of dtrace and gives a badly needed boost to Oracle's image. So will the license for ZFS be corrected next?
Source : dtrace for linux; Oracle does the right thing.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday February 16 2018, @05:22PM
I missed in the summary are that the GPL part applies to the kernel components. That makes it jibe correctly with upstream kernel development. Linux uses GPL v2.
The userspace is under a 'permissive' license. That allows interchange of code with the other DTrace, Open DTrace [github.com]. Open DTrace is the one used by FreeBSD, Illumos, and the others.
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