4 ms·

This is ridiculous. CoreOS is managing their own distro, so why not just package in ZFS and get it over with. It's been how many years now waiting for the next

by 23david 12y ago

This is ridiculous. CoreOS is managing their own distro, so why not just package in ZFS and get it over with. It's been how many years now waiting for the next great ZFS competitor? If nobody is able to improve on ZFS, how about we just all jump on the bandwagon and move on with our lives? If nothing else, having more people using ZFS may inspire someone to actually improve on it. BTRFS has such a limited feature set in comparison to ZFS that with the advent of ZFS on Linux, it's really hard to understand the community's continued backing of BTRFS as the Linux community's CoW filesystem competitor to ZFS. Spend a few weeks using ZFS on Linux on a machine with a few SSDs and a few HDDs, or just enable it on a linux laptop with a SSD drive, and it's hard to go back to anything else.

tacticus 12y ago
Because sun decided to sabotage it when they released it and oracle haven't stepped back yet.
- throwaway90446 12y ago
  Sabotage? How, exactly? I have heard of no major corruption or performance bugs in ZFS, what am I missing?
  - kbar13 12y ago
    licensing
  - ecnahc515 12y ago
    From http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue "ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), and the Linux kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2). While both are free open source licenses they are restrictive licenses. The combination of them causes problems because it prevents using pieces of code exclusively available under one license with pieces of code exclusively available under the other in the same binary. "
  - techdragon 12y ago
    as others have said below. the CDDL or 'cuddle' license as some chose to pronounce it. Is incompatible with the GPL, which means two things. 1 - We can't just take the code and add it to the kernel. 2 - The patent and other legal grants in the licence won't apply if we try to reverse engineer a compatible GPL2 equivalent for the kernel to use, which will be a HUGE risk for the few companies that would probably consider the cost of reverse engineering worth it. And before you say it can be done without company support. I have 2 things to say, hows that going for the ReiserFS 4 fans who wanted to keep improving that, and in order to continue the work on ZFS effectively, the existing ZFS developers have 'ganged up' and now try to work on everything so that the openzfs project can be a single source of truth for the ZFS source code, and a reverse engineered version would be very unlikely to benefit from this, and would therefore require even more developer time just keeping up with the improvements 'upstream' in ZFS from the 'original' ZFS codebase.
    - 23david 12y ago
      In the case of the kernel, this prevents us from distributing ZFS as part of the kernel binary. However, there is nothing in either license that prevents distributing it in the form of a binary module or in the form of source code. Source: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue ZFS cannot be added to Linux directly because the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. ZFS can, however, be distributed as a DKMS package separate from the main kernel package. Source: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS So why not just distribute the DKMS package with a distro? Easy enough. Will it ruin the user experience somehow?
jeffdavis 12y ago
The license for ZFS is still CDDL

by 23david 12y ago

tacticus 12y ago

Because sun decided to sabotage it when they released it and oracle haven't stepped back yet.

throwaway90446 12y ago
Sabotage? How, exactly? I have heard of no major corruption or performance bugs in ZFS, what am I missing?
- kbar13 12y ago
  licensing
- ecnahc515 12y ago
  From http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue "ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), and the Linux kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2). While both are free open source licenses they are restrictive licenses. The combination of them causes problems because it prevents using pieces of code exclusively available under one license with pieces of code exclusively available under the other in the same binary. "
- techdragon 12y ago
  as others have said below. the CDDL or 'cuddle' license as some chose to pronounce it. Is incompatible with the GPL, which means two things. 1 - We can't just take the code and add it to the kernel. 2 - The patent and other legal grants in the licence won't apply if we try to reverse engineer a compatible GPL2 equivalent for the kernel to use, which will be a HUGE risk for the few companies that would probably consider the cost of reverse engineering worth it. And before you say it can be done without company support. I have 2 things to say, hows that going for the ReiserFS 4 fans who wanted to keep improving that, and in order to continue the work on ZFS effectively, the existing ZFS developers have 'ganged up' and now try to work on everything so that the openzfs project can be a single source of truth for the ZFS source code, and a reverse engineered version would be very unlikely to benefit from this, and would therefore require even more developer time just keeping up with the improvements 'upstream' in ZFS from the 'original' ZFS codebase.
  - 23david 12y ago
    In the case of the kernel, this prevents us from distributing ZFS as part of the kernel binary. However, there is nothing in either license that prevents distributing it in the form of a binary module or in the form of source code. Source: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue ZFS cannot be added to Linux directly because the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. ZFS can, however, be distributed as a DKMS package separate from the main kernel package. Source: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS So why not just distribute the DKMS package with a distro? Easy enough. Will it ruin the user experience somehow?

jeffdavis 12y ago

The license for ZFS is still CDDL