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I had somehow missed this; this is excellent news! The Oracle port of DTrace to Linux is (far and away) the most complete port; Kris van Hees and team did a ve

• rhinoceraptor 9y ago
  If ZFS were also relicensed, would Illumos be able to relicense OpenZFS as well, even with the divergence?
  • Conan_Kudo 9y ago
    If they can get in touch with the developers or their employers, then yes. OpenZFS could be fully relicensed as the main reason for not doing it is because of the substantial Oracle ZFS base code not being licensed appropriately.
    • mjg59 9y ago
      The majority of OpenZFS is under CDDL 1.0 or later, so Oracle can relicense it by releasing a new version of CDDL that permits relicensing any ZFS-related code to GPLv2. Wikipedia and the FSF did something similar to relicense Wikipedia from GFDL to CC.
  • jsiepkes 9y ago
    If Oracle's sources would be GPL'ed all OpenZFS changes would also have to be put under the GPL (or dual licensed) if you want to use those. OpenZFS doesn't have a CLA I think so that might be somewhat of a problem. Then again most ZFS changes were made by people for their employers (Joyent, Delphix, etc.) so it might be that only a few companies (...and Allan Jude ;-) need to give their blessing.
    • takeda 9y ago
      I don't think the license can be done retroactively. I mean Oracle owns copyright to major part of ZFS and they can change license to that. But the contributions done to OpenZFS each developer owns copyright to their own work. I believe the original code could be treated as either CDDL or GPL, but the code that was contributed before license change would still be under CDDL. I think OpenZFS project owners would need to track down every contributor and get their permission to change the license. Perhaps it wouldn't be terribly hard with git/svn blame command. The only problem would be if the original authors were no longer available, but hopefully that code could be just rewritten by someone else. Things would be much easier if every author would surrender their copyright to OpenZFS project, but some people might have problem with it since then you surrender all claims to the code.
      • Conan_Kudo 9y ago
        > Things would be much easier if every author would surrender their copyright to OpenZFS project, but some people might have problem with it since then you surrender all claims to the code. This is super-dangerous. There's a reason that copyright assignment agreements are rare. In a lot of jurisdictions, it's not even possible. Most copyright license agreements instead force unlimited sublicensing grants, which provides de facto ownership of the copyrighted code, rather than de jure ownership.
        • nordsieck 9y ago
          > There's a reason that copyright assignment agreements are rare. In a lot of jurisdictions, it's not even possible. How is a software development business possible under those circumstances? In the US one of the core pieces of every employment contract (for software developers) is IP assignment.
          • vetinari 9y ago
            IP assignment itself is a bit of hand-wavy term, that hides a lot. Those jurisdictions, where you cannot assign authorship, make distinction between being an author and being able to distribute a copyrighted work. It you wrote something, you will be forever the author and you cannot transfer the authorship. What you can transfer is the rights to distribution.
  • 4ad 9y ago
    OpenZFS can't be relicensed as GPL since FreeBSD won't be able to use it. Perhaps it could be dual-licensed, not sure, but that would be bad for FreeBSD as well. If it would be integrated into the mainline Linux kernel, I don't believe FreeBSD could merge back subsequent ZFS changes done on the Linux side. If OpenZFS were relincensed and developed outside the mainline Linux tree (as it is now), FreeBSD would be able to get all changes, but it would still be annoying to actually use ZFS in Linux for the same reason it is annoying to use it now, even though the legal uncertainties would disappear.
    • insertnickname 9y ago
      FreeBSD is OK with CDDL but not GPL?
      • boomboomsubban 9y ago
        Yeah, the CDDL is weak copyleft, meaning derived works don't need to be licensed CDDL. The GPL is strong copyleft, and could force all of FreeBSD to adopt the GPL.
        • LukeShu 9y ago
          To clarify that a bit: The CDDL is a per-file copyleft; you must provide the sources of the CDDL-licensed source files. The GPL is a per-program copyleft; you must provide the sources of the entire program if it contains GPL-licensed code; the source of the entire program effectively becomes GPL-licensed if you incorporate GPL-licensed code. If I made a closed derivative of the FreeBSD kernel, I'd have to provide the (CDDL) ZFS sources, but nothing else. If ZFS were GPL, I'd have to provide the sources to the entire kernel.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • simcop2387 9y ago
      Instead of relicensing to gpl it could be relicensed to bsd or MIT both of which can be included in mainline Linux kernel and in bsd land too, without compromising future development edit: stupid phone autocorrect on the train this morning. s/not/MIT/