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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 DannyB on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:44PM (2 children)
It's not really an agreement. Although at least one court has treated it that way, and did see the requirements of the GPL as consideration, and under that reasoning enforced the GPL requirements upon some GPL violator.
License: - a Permission. Nothing more. Fishing License. Dog License. Driver License. Marriage License (which doesn't need to be periodically renewed like a Dog License, in order to maintain its validity.)
Copyright: - right(s) reserved exclusively to the author of a creative work, by law. Books, music, etc, player piano rolls, and computer software. Sometimes these rights are sliced and diced into a million pieces, like the RIAA with performance rights, mechanical rights, distribution rights, etc.
Copyright infringement: - unauthorized exercise of any of the rights exclusively reserved to the copyright owner.
Copyright License: - A permission, to exercise some subset (up to and including all) rights exclusively reserved to the copyright owner.
The only way you can have a copyright license is if the copyright owner or their agent gives you such a license to use certain of the rights.
In some cases you can get a copyright license by agreeing to a contract which may involve paying money, promising to give your firstborn, your vital organs, etc. as well as other promises on your part, such as not making copies of the licensed work.
EULA: - a click through "agreement" that purports to bind you to some contract.
An open source license is a license that gives you a license (eg permission) to use certain of the copyright owner's exclusive rights. You don't have to agree to anything -- but not doing so means you are not granted a license (eg permission) to exercise those rights. The GPL must be waived by the defendant, not the plaintiff. The plaintiff would simply go to court: Dear judge, this soundrel is distributing (or maybe even just using) my GPL licensed work without a license, make him stop and give me damages and attorneys fees!!! It is up to the defendant to waive the GPL and say, "but judge, I have a license". Then plaintiffs can point out that because you are in violation of clauses X, Y and Z of the license, you actually do not have any license to exercise the rights reserved exclusively to the copyright owner. (The license required that any linked code must also be under the GPL)
Maybe in some sense it is an agreement. But not like a contract. You don't sign it. You don't exchange consideration. (Although one judge did see it differently, that upholding your obligations is your consideration exchanges for the consideration of being granted the permissions to exercise some exclusive rights.)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.