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What is your computer's file system? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 74 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:57PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:57PM (#464572) Journal

    If Oracle wanted, they could simply release ZFS under a GPL compatible license.

    This is true if and only if Oracle is the only contributor to ZFS. Is this the case?

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  • (Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @07:51PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday February 08 2017, @07:51PM (#464716)

    Good question. I don't know, and am too lazy to look it up at the moment.

    Even if there are outside contributors, if they are limited in number, they can be asked to sign off on a GPL-compatible license as well. Code contributions from hold-outs can be re-written in the worst-case.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Pino P on Thursday February 09 2017, @03:30PM

      by Pino P (4721) on Thursday February 09 2017, @03:30PM (#465027) Journal

      Code contributions from hold-outs can be re-written

      You mean reimplement an internal API? The legal feasibility of that depends on whether Oracle loses its appeal in another pending lawsuit.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Friday February 10 2017, @10:58PM

    by DECbot (832) on Friday February 10 2017, @10:58PM (#465617) Journal

    No, ZFS forked after the source code was released in 2005, but was released under the CDDL, and later that year the FSF concluded that the CDDL was not legally compatible with the GPL--thus why it is not in the Linux kernel.

    So the actual development of ZFS is very federated. You have the the BSDs and linux projects each porting from the Sun code while Oracle still controls the closed source code used in Solaris. OpenZFS is the umbrella project for ZFS that gives a common way to test compatibility between different ZFS ports. It was determined that versioning ZFS was impractical because of the distributed development did not support the use of common release numbers (and then you'd likely have to work with Oracle). So a flag system was implemented by which ZFS file systems can be shared between different ZFS ports if the receiving system supports the flags used by the sending system.

    I guess Oracle could GPL their code, but then it would become a real license mess.

    OpenZFS Wiki [wikipedia.org]
    ZFS Wiki [wikipedia.org]

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base