Re: BTRFS snapshot space consumption (was: New laptop: need advice on choice...)
Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> writes:
> Peter Wiersig wrote:
>
> ZFS is now in two incompatible versions: Oracle's, and ZFSonLinux,
> which is now effectively the parent for all the other efforts including
> FreeBSD's ZFS.
The biggest problem is the incompatible license which makes the code
untouchable.
How Oracle is able to distribute a Linux kernel with ZFS support without
either releasing the whole thing under a GPL compatible license or
violating the kernel GPL is a miracle I didn't found the time or need to
investigate. I consider ZFS a poisoned gift from Oracle to the Linux
community and will not be surprised when they go for one vendor, on
their whim. If they wanted to, they could release their code under a
compatible license.
My knowledge on the whole affair is bit vague as I had no real interest
past reading LWN or cks articles on ZFS, and I noted the problems around
the CDDL once Illumos was released.
I understand from cks that the real development nowadays happens on
ZFSonLinux as the other OSes were stopped in development, but I would
not touch that patch on the future prospect on a lawsuit analog to the
SCO one.
from https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/FAQ#licensing
"""Licensing
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. In the case of the kernel, this prevents us from
distributing ZFS on Linux 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."""
Peter
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