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Has there ever been a serious community effort to relicense ZFS? Intuitively, that feels like it would have been a much more worthwhile effort from the start th
by buu700 9y ago
Has there ever been a serious community effort to relicense ZFS? Intuitively, that feels like it would have been a much more worthwhile effort from the start than trying to recreate it from scratch in the form of btrfs.
Is that a reasonable idea? What would it take for someone to go about it today? I would expect that it would be possible if every copyright holder (I'd guess mainly developers and their current/past employers, next of kin, estates, etc.) were asked to sign a document collectively consenting to having ZFS's license changed.
Or is there a reason that some current copyright holders might not want that? I get why Sun would've refused since it was a competitive advantage for Solaris, but what's stopping it from happening now?
This whole situation just seems really silly as I'm not sure what anyone has to gain from it.
- chungy 9y agoOracle holds the copyright on much of OpenZFS. They'll have to agree to relicensing it first. With Solaris dead I'd generally agree that it's a little pointless to keep it incompatible. They might as well just place it under something like BSD or Apache 2, that should keep the FreeBSD and Mac OS X ports happy as well as opening up the possibility of inclusion in the Linux kernel. With Oracle Solaris dead, I think there's even a case for Oracle's bottom-line: they could start including ZFS with Oracle Enterprise Linux and boast about all the advantages of using it there.
- jlgaddis 9y ago> "... they could start including ZFS with Oracle Enterprise Linux and boast about all the advantages of using it there." As the copyright holder, can't they do that anyway? By not relicensing it, they keep others -- Canonical, Red Hat, etc. -- from being able to do the same thing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]