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tylerl | 6 years ago

> ...disliked ZFS because they feel it was designed to be incompatible with Linux...

Ya... That may have just a bit to do with the fact that ZFS is released under a licence that was explicitly designed to be incompatible with Linux.

"Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. ... the engineers who wrote Solaris ... had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that."

I can see how that might suggest to Linux maintainers that they are not welcome to use this code. Maybe sorta.

discuss

throw0101a|6 years ago

Please stop spreading this. Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time, and the boss (?) of the person that you quote, has explicitly said this was not the case:

* https://marc.info/?l=opensolaris-discuss&m=115740406507420

Sun needed a file-based license that had patent provisions. There were none available at the time so they created their own. Given that CDDL-license technologies (Dtrace, ZFS) have been incorporated into other open source (BSD) as well as closed source projects (macOS) shows that it is quite accommodating.

p_l|6 years ago

The incompatibility comes from GPL side terms. As for it being intentional, there are only anecdotes, and conflicting ones. When first CDDL sources dropped (DTrace) management expected to see it incorporated into Linux within month

tylerl|6 years ago

Thing is, the copyright is owned by Oracle of all companies and and the legality is more than questionable enough to allow Oracle to sue for damages the second the code shows up in use by a big enough fish.

Oracle won't relicense the code (and lose out on a chance at another software copyright lawsuit), and it won't ever be safe to touch without an ironclad licensing story.

You can hope that Oracle folds and gets bought by someone decent. But hope won't take you that far.

Throw it away. Start over from scratch. The code may be great, but it's gone. It's a shame it ended up where it did. Take a moment if you need, but then move on. ZFS isn't going to happen.