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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 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 thing about landline phones is that they never get lost. No air tag necessary.