4 ms·

> For their sake, I hope they don't take the 'We have BtrFS/eBPF/X' path. To my eyes at least they are pretty much helpless to do anything about it because of

by bibyte 8y ago

> For their sake, I hope they don't take the 'We have BtrFS/eBPF/X' path. To my eyes at least they are pretty much helpless to do anything about it because of the licences. Do you have any ideas as to how they could work around the licencing issues ? Edit: I am talking about Linux not Windows.

saghm 8y ago
Not suggesting this should actually be done by other distros, but from what I understand, Ubuntu basically just ignored the license and included it anyways
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  They didn't ignore the license; they looked at it, and concluded that ZFS wasn't a derivative work of Linux and therefore it was safe to run CDDL modules on a GPL kernel. There is some disagreement as to whether this is actually valid, but it's no blatant disregard.
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Honest question, who could claim to be damaged by someone running ZFS on linux? The closest I can get is 'unlicensed derivative work' regarding implementing a struct of function pointers, which is really contentious and unsettled (oracle v google, APIs copyrightable, etc). I'm not a lawyer or anything close, but who would possibly have standing and motive to sue? There's, what, a dozen people at most who have copyright on those struct definitions? And API copyrightability is still unsettled? Maybe the lawyers were too conservative, and the engineers who listened to them were applying the wrong model? Someone tell me why I'm wrong.
jen20 8y ago
The licensing issue for Windows is different to Linux. ZFS as released by Sun was under the CDDL. The source of incompatibility with ZFS and DTrace on Linux (until recently) was from the GPL, not from the CDDL. Windows (and, indeed MacOS - which has shipped DTrace for years), have no such restriction - the CDDL allows inclusion in larger proprietary works.
- bibyte 8y ago
  I should have clarified I was talking about Linux not Windows. I can see how my quote could have caused that mistake. Sorry.
kasabali 8y ago
> To my eyes at least they are pretty much helpless to do anything about it because of the licences. Do you have any ideas as to how they could work around the licencing issues ? DTrace has a linux port which is GPL licenced since last year. So they are not helpless and there is nothing to work around.

by bibyte 8y ago

saghm 8y ago

Not suggesting this should actually be done by other distros, but from what I understand, Ubuntu basically just ignored the license and included it anyways

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
They didn't ignore the license; they looked at it, and concluded that ZFS wasn't a derivative work of Linux and therefore it was safe to run CDDL modules on a GPL kernel. There is some disagreement as to whether this is actually valid, but it's no blatant disregard.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  Honest question, who could claim to be damaged by someone running ZFS on linux? The closest I can get is 'unlicensed derivative work' regarding implementing a struct of function pointers, which is really contentious and unsettled (oracle v google, APIs copyrightable, etc). I'm not a lawyer or anything close, but who would possibly have standing and motive to sue? There's, what, a dozen people at most who have copyright on those struct definitions? And API copyrightability is still unsettled? Maybe the lawyers were too conservative, and the engineers who listened to them were applying the wrong model? Someone tell me why I'm wrong.

jen20 8y ago

The licensing issue for Windows is different to Linux. ZFS as released by Sun was under the CDDL. The source of incompatibility with ZFS and DTrace on Linux (until recently) was from the GPL, not from the CDDL. Windows (and, indeed MacOS - which has shipped DTrace for years), have no such restriction - the CDDL allows inclusion in larger proprietary works.

bibyte 8y ago
I should have clarified I was talking about Linux not Windows. I can see how my quote could have caused that mistake. Sorry.

kasabali 8y ago

> To my eyes at least they are pretty much helpless to do anything about it because of the licences. Do you have any ideas as to how they could work around the licencing issues ? DTrace has a linux port which is GPL licenced since last year. So they are not helpless and there is nothing to work around.