6 ms·

They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL, which also wouldn't cost them anything as f

They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL, which also wouldn't cost them anything as far as I'm aware, but we're both making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawnmower.

ksec 1y ago
>by simply updating CDDL How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to BSD / MIT.
- ndiddy 1y ago
  The version of ZFS that everybody (besides the dwindling number of Oracle Solaris customers) uses now, OpenZFS, has been maintained completely independently of Oracle since they shut down OpenSolaris in 2010. This means that Oracle relicensing ZFS wouldn't do anything to help with getting it integrated into the Linux kernel, since there's been hundreds of independent contributors to ZFS since then who all own their own copyrights. Because ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, which has an automatic upgrade clause, Oracle could simply copy/paste the GPLv2 license text and call it "CDDL v2" if they wanted to make ZFS able to be included in Linux.
  - baobun 1y ago
    Not so fast. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409160
    - ndiddy 1y ago
      Aww :(
- saghm 1y ago
  Swapping to an entirely new license rather than adding one sentence to the existing one is not simpler either in terms of linguistics or getting approval from their army of lawyers.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    It's not any more difficult either. They would both require getting all past contributors to agree. I think some projects have done that in the past, but probably none where a big company owns the copyright to most of the code.
    - saghm 1y ago
      It would require getting all past contributors _and_ the current copyright owner to agree. Normally I'd agree that getting all past contributors to agree is the hard part, but the copyright owner here is Oracle. I'd have more confidence in getting the rest of the contributors to agree to a license in Pig Latin than getting Oracle to make literally any change to the license for this.
paxcoder 1y ago
[dead]
muglug 1y ago
> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago. Not quite sure this is doing them damage.
- Lerc 1y ago
  Making a concession when they have not been forced to might indicate weakness to some. In that sense showing a speck of humanity might actually harm their stock.
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too busy to give it a thought. And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time. So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior. I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other. Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.
    - chrisweekly 1y ago
      Thank for describing so eloquently this phenomenon, which IMHO is the root cause of the dysfunction endemic to big companies.
  - make3 1y ago
    Satya's attempt to rehumanize Microsoft by making efforts to help open source projects really helped Microsoft's image
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL ZFS can be run under Linux - combining the Linux kernel with ZFS is a collective work (collection) of two independent works.
- freeone3000 1y ago
  However, it is not legal to then redistribute this combination. Which essentially means linux distros cannot ship with OpenZFS: each user must combine the two on their own. (This doesn’t necessarily stop people, but it is read by Debian as “illegal enough” to warrant a splash screen on installing OpenZFS that you’re losing the right to redistribute.)
  - curt15 1y ago
    ZFS is widely used with Linux in HPC (https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs). Is asking users to install ZFS separately really that much of a lift for ZFS's target audience?
    - remexre 1y ago
      Being out-of-tree means that kernel refactors break ZFS, and that it has a lot fewer hands and eyeballs available for the kinds of bugs that require internal design changes to fix (rather than paper over).
      - josefx 1y ago
        Most people don't blindly run the latest kernel. I don't think I ever ran into issues with out of kernel modules on a stable distro.
    - pyuser583 1y ago
      Asking for seperate install of a filesystem is a big deal. It severely limits how the filesystem can be used.
cxr 1y ago
Ignoring how Sun/Oracle's shenanigans with ZFS don't nearly account for "90% of their brand damage"... > simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files: ~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "$Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>$" | wc -l 821 (The CDDL is a file-based license. At the time of that decision, there were already roughly a hundred CDDL-licensed files in the source tree specified as available under "Version 1.0 only".)
NegativeK 1y ago
Why would they do that instead of the status quo, which is a gift for their lawyers to open later? I don't associate Oracle and good will, and I don't think they care.
hobs 1y ago
No, they could not. Anything Oracle does at this point will never undo the damage their brand has, or else you are a fool.
singpolyma3 1y ago
Oracle's official position is that CDDL is GPL compatible and no changes are needed.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  When they’ve testified to that in a courtroom and we have established legal precedence, then, and only then, would I remotely consider it the case.
  - singpolyma3 1y ago
    Their lawyers have said it in public many times so there are a lot of legal doctrines that would make it very hard for them to backtrack at this point.

ksec 1y ago

>by simply updating CDDL How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to BSD / MIT.

ndiddy 1y ago
The version of ZFS that everybody (besides the dwindling number of Oracle Solaris customers) uses now, OpenZFS, has been maintained completely independently of Oracle since they shut down OpenSolaris in 2010. This means that Oracle relicensing ZFS wouldn't do anything to help with getting it integrated into the Linux kernel, since there's been hundreds of independent contributors to ZFS since then who all own their own copyrights. Because ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, which has an automatic upgrade clause, Oracle could simply copy/paste the GPLv2 license text and call it "CDDL v2" if they wanted to make ZFS able to be included in Linux.
- baobun 1y ago
  Not so fast. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409160
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    Aww :(
saghm 1y ago
Swapping to an entirely new license rather than adding one sentence to the existing one is not simpler either in terms of linguistics or getting approval from their army of lawyers.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  It's not any more difficult either. They would both require getting all past contributors to agree. I think some projects have done that in the past, but probably none where a big company owns the copyright to most of the code.
  - saghm 1y ago
    It would require getting all past contributors _and_ the current copyright owner to agree. Normally I'd agree that getting all past contributors to agree is the hard part, but the copyright owner here is Oracle. I'd have more confidence in getting the rest of the contributors to agree to a license in Pig Latin than getting Oracle to make literally any change to the license for this.

paxcoder 1y ago

[dead]

muglug 1y ago

> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago. Not quite sure this is doing them damage.

Lerc 1y ago
Making a concession when they have not been forced to might indicate weakness to some. In that sense showing a speck of humanity might actually harm their stock.
- Nevermark 1y ago
  My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too busy to give it a thought. And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time. So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior. I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other. Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    Thank for describing so eloquently this phenomenon, which IMHO is the root cause of the dysfunction endemic to big companies.
- make3 1y ago
  Satya's attempt to rehumanize Microsoft by making efforts to help open source projects really helped Microsoft's image

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL ZFS can be run under Linux - combining the Linux kernel with ZFS is a collective work (collection) of two independent works.

freeone3000 1y ago
However, it is not legal to then redistribute this combination. Which essentially means linux distros cannot ship with OpenZFS: each user must combine the two on their own. (This doesn’t necessarily stop people, but it is read by Debian as “illegal enough” to warrant a splash screen on installing OpenZFS that you’re losing the right to redistribute.)
- curt15 1y ago
  ZFS is widely used with Linux in HPC (https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs). Is asking users to install ZFS separately really that much of a lift for ZFS's target audience?
  - remexre 1y ago
    Being out-of-tree means that kernel refactors break ZFS, and that it has a lot fewer hands and eyeballs available for the kinds of bugs that require internal design changes to fix (rather than paper over).
    - josefx 1y ago
      Most people don't blindly run the latest kernel. I don't think I ever ran into issues with out of kernel modules on a stable distro.
  - pyuser583 1y ago
    Asking for seperate install of a filesystem is a big deal. It severely limits how the filesystem can be used.

cxr 1y ago

Ignoring how Sun/Oracle's shenanigans with ZFS don't nearly account for "90% of their brand damage"... > simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files: ~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "$Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>$" | wc -l 821 (The CDDL is a file-based license. At the time of that decision, there were already roughly a hundred CDDL-licensed files in the source tree specified as available under "Version 1.0 only".)

NegativeK 1y ago

Why would they do that instead of the status quo, which is a gift for their lawyers to open later? I don't associate Oracle and good will, and I don't think they care.

hobs 1y ago

No, they could not. Anything Oracle does at this point will never undo the damage their brand has, or else you are a fool.

singpolyma3 1y ago

Oracle's official position is that CDDL is GPL compatible and no changes are needed.

kstrauser 1y ago
When they’ve testified to that in a courtroom and we have established legal precedence, then, and only then, would I remotely consider it the case.
- singpolyma3 1y ago
  Their lawyers have said it in public many times so there are a lot of legal doctrines that would make it very hard for them to backtrack at this point.