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I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete clean room

by xxpor 6y ago

I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete clean room rewrite, there's really nothing anyone can do about it. It's not like you're going to convince Oracle to relicence it.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete clean room rewrite, there's really nothing anyone can do about it. I suppose it depends on how you mean that, but I probably disagree; when Greg KH can say, "My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant" [0], and Torvalds says, "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel... [the] benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it any more..." [1], we've gone well beyond "they just can't merge it because of licensing" and into "[political] opposition". > It's not like you're going to convince Oracle to relicence it. I've always wondered at this, actually; why doesn't Oracle relicense it? BTRFS, AFAIK, was started at Oracle but basically flopped; why on earth do they not simply bring over the far-superior ZFS codebase to replace it? They can't possibly be trying to protect Solaris the way Sun did; they've killed off >90% of the Solaris team [2] and AFAIK have made exactly zero effort to sell Solaris for years now. Why wouldn't they get ZFS upstreamed into Linux and make it a core feature of OEL (or whatever they were using BTRFS for)? [0] https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2 [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-s... [2] https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solaris/ https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solar...
- xxpor 6y ago
  >I've always wondered at this, actually; why doesn't Oracle relicense it? Honestly, I would assume because Oracle's response to anything charitable or nice is "fuck you"
trasz 6y ago
If Oracle relicensed it, it would open the door to litigation, since GPL, differently from CDDL, doesn't include a patent grant.
- xxpor 6y ago
  That's a really good point. I guess they could include a patent grant in addition?

by xxpor 6y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete clean room rewrite, there's really nothing anyone can do about it. I suppose it depends on how you mean that, but I probably disagree; when Greg KH can say, "My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant" [0], and Torvalds says, "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel... [the] benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it any more..." [1], we've gone well beyond "they just can't merge it because of licensing" and into "[political] opposition". > It's not like you're going to convince Oracle to relicence it. I've always wondered at this, actually; why doesn't Oracle relicense it? BTRFS, AFAIK, was started at Oracle but basically flopped; why on earth do they not simply bring over the far-superior ZFS codebase to replace it? They can't possibly be trying to protect Solaris the way Sun did; they've killed off >90% of the Solaris team [2] and AFAIK have made exactly zero effort to sell Solaris for years now. Why wouldn't they get ZFS upstreamed into Linux and make it a core feature of OEL (or whatever they were using BTRFS for)? [0] https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2 [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-s... [2] https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solaris/ https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solar...

xxpor 6y ago
>I've always wondered at this, actually; why doesn't Oracle relicense it? Honestly, I would assume because Oracle's response to anything charitable or nice is "fuck you"

trasz 6y ago

If Oracle relicensed it, it would open the door to litigation, since GPL, differently from CDDL, doesn't include a patent grant.

xxpor 6y ago
That's a really good point. I guess they could include a patent grant in addition?