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 Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)
That is an excellent point.
I don't believe I am spreading FUD.
While I don't have any problem linking anything I want to GPL code on my personal systems; and encouraging other people to do so; I won't do it in a commercial setting. I can't. There are probably others that can't.
Another excellent point is that if we're not worried about kernel blobs, and it seems neither of us are, then ZFS is probably not a concern.
My caution started with the GPL licensed MySQL ages ago. Probably no longer an issue. But if the copyright owner views it a certain way, I'm definitely not going to argue with them about it -- even if they are wrong.
I've taken that attitude to the extreme with even a potential technical licensing issue that could arise.
I'll also bring up Oracle again. They should have no case to bring a lawsuit. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't if they saw dollar signs. This is a company that is suing over APIs being copyrightable, and merely having a compatible API is a copyright infringement. So don't be so quick to say FUD.
SCO had no case against IBM either. Maybe only a dispute about an irrelevant contract. As that is all that is left of their case. Yet it lingers on. I bring this up because while SCO had no case, and IBM was vindicated, look how much time and money has been expended. We know SCO spent at least $30 million in legal costs -- that we know of for sure. Over the years it was estimated that IBM has spent at least a hundred million. In 2002 if I said that SCO might sue that Linux had copyright infringing code stolen from Unix, you might accuse me of FUD. But in March 2003 I would have laughed at you for it. So don't be so quick with the FUD.
There are people who deliberately, willfully and knowingly spread FUD and for exactly the purpose of what FUD expands to. I have a legitimate concern.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:40PM
If you're going to worry about baseless lawsuits your only real defense is to be so insignificant and uninteresting that nobody knows about you. After all it doesn't matter if you've never done anything even remotely questionably legal in your entire life - you can still be dragged through an immensely expensive lawsuit by anyone who wants to cause you trouble. Heck, pretty much the entire RIAA "anti-piracy" legal strategy is to sue people who can't afford to fight back, despite a near-total lack of evidence.