zfs discuss - May 2010 - Broadening of ZFS open source license

In the article about MeeGo:
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/387196/103bbafc9266fd0d/ it is stated, that Oracle
(together with RedHat) contributes a bulk part of BTRFS development. Given that
ZFS and BTRFS both share many similar goals, wouldn''t it be reasonable
for Oracle to license ZFS under wider range of FOSS licenses (similar to how
Mozilla released their code under triple license, since MPL is incomatible with
GPL)? Is there any movement in that direction (or the solid intention not to do
so?).

Thanks,

Hillel.
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On May 11, 2010, at 10:29 PM, Hillel Lubman wrote:
> In the article about MeeGo:
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/387196/103bbafc9266fd0d/ it is stated, that Oracle
(together with RedHat) contributes a bulk part of BTRFS development. Given that
ZFS and BTRFS both share many similar goals, wouldn''t it be reasonable
for Oracle to license ZFS under wider range of FOSS licenses (similar to how
Mozilla released their code under triple license, since MPL is incomatible with
GPL)? Is there any movement in that direction (or the solid intention not to do
so?).

I don''t think so, not in the short run at least. Oracle has a edge over
the competition with Solaris that also is the primary platform for ZFS
development, they control Solaris and can used it in their advantage. Why give
it away to the competition and incorporate ZFS it into a OS they does not
control? Oracle knows how to make money and I don''t think broadening
the license for ZFS is going to do that in a near future.

Henrik
http://sparcv9.blogspot.com

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> From: zfs-discuss-bounces at opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-
> bounces at opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Hillel Lubman
>
> Oracle (together with RedHat) contributes a bulk part of BTRFS
> development. Given that ZFS and BTRFS both share many similar goals,
> wouldn''t it be reasonable for Oracle to license ZFS under wider
range
> of FOSS licenses 
I''m no expert in this subject, but I do feel confident in my knowledge
that
the license conflict is just one of many obstacles to prevent ZFS from
working nicely in Linux.  The license issue is not insurmountable, and many
reasonable solutions could possibly be created (two that I know of ...
Either compile the ZFS code separately from the kernel, and link it in
dynamically, which would require something like LILO to statically map hard
drive sectors to load the modules at boot time, assuming you want your OS
boot pool to be ZFS.  Or compile or translate the ZFS code and distribute
the binaries or translated code under a different license which is
compatible with GPL.)

The license issue is just one of many obstacles.  Like ... in Linux,
you''ve
got a filesystem layer, which is just filesystems.  They interact with a
device layer, which knows nothing of filesystems.  Throw in some software
raid, and a separation of kernel space from user space...  All of a sudden,
if you think about building ZFS for Linux, you''re stepping on a lot of
toes,
and violating a lot of the culture of the Linux kernel developers. 
They''re
a bunch of disperse programmers, who, in order to keep organized, must
compartmentalize and modularize themselves.  Unlike the ZFS developers, who
almost all work under one roof (er ... company name.)  The Linux guys
don''t
like some big thing coming along, crossing over between kernel and
userspace, undoing everything they''ve ever done, all being developed by
one
big company that they can''t boss around.  I don''t know if you
noticed that
GPL is very much anti-corporation, or anti-commercial.  They''re more
comfortable with just another filesystem, similar to all the other
filesystems they''ve had in the past, with the notable support for copy
on
write.

IMHO, one of the best benefits of ZFS (besides the obvious copy on write) is
the fact that the RAID layer (if I may use that term) has intimate knowledge
of both the block-level devices, and the filesystem.  Which means ZFS is
able to aggregate many small writes to separate sectors of separate files,
and intelligently map all the filesystem blocks to consecutive physical
blocks (or striped physical blocks), which means they''re all
consolidated
into one large sequential write.  This is a huge performance gain, for both
small random operations and/or large sequential operations.  I don''t
know if
BTRFS is going to be able to do this sort of stuff, given the isolation from
the RAID layer.  I think BTRFS is just going to give Linux users snapshots,
and block-level incremental backups.

To gain the performance benefits, it necessitates erasing the separation
between filesystem and block-level (raid) code.

> From: zfs-discuss-bounces at opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-
> bounces at opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Edward Ned Harvey
> 
> I''m no expert in this subject, but I do feel confident in my
knowledge
> that
> the license conflict is just one of many obstacles to prevent ZFS from
> working nicely in Linux.
Then again, if you''d like a more authoritative answer, you might just
go ask
the Linux kernel development list, "Why don''t you guys use
ZFS?"  And Linus
might reply with some overly generalized derogatory statements intermingled
with cuss words and unnecessary offenses, such as he does when talking about
git vs svn, or ext3 (dump) vs ... having no backups, er something ... he
never offered any suggestion on anything to use aside from dump after
ripping dump apart.

And then people will act like God spoke to them, and many stones will be
carved.  People who are looking for answers will get bad answers and further
confusion, and people who just know enough to follow unquestioningly will
become minions and activists, and people who are truly experts will keep
their thoughts silent, and slowly randomly perform a little bit of damage
control before moving on.

Heheheh

BTW, I had the pleasure of listening to Linus talk about (aka
unintelligently rant about) svn.  And it was absolutely worthless except for
entertainment.  Quite a religious person, no doubt about that.

Good luck getting him to help ZFS into the kernel.  ;-)