[hnlmorg]

@AlgorithmicTime you've been shadow banned it seems but you did raise a point that is worth expanding on:

> Oracle owns ZFS. Or, rather, it bought Sun, which was the company which originally wrote ZFS. So, it doesn't really need to worry about the licensing issues.

Oracle owning ZFS doesn't magically absolve them of risk however it does reduce the risk. But with ZFS being open source, another contributor might have a claim if Oracle were to breach the CDDL license with code written by said contributor (similar to the SCO vs UNIX lawsuits of yesteryear).

To get around this Oracle would need to contact all 3rd party contributors and get the to agree to a license change. This would, in all practicality, then be reflected in a new release (like the GP suggested).

However it is now even more complicated than that because OpenZFS (which is what Linux runs) has diverged from ZFS (which Oracle maintain). So while Oracle would need to agree to any changes in the licensing of OpenZFS (as there's still Oracle code present in OpenZFS), Oracle are not the ones maintaining it and nor could they ship their own version of ZFS as Linux kernel modules to answer any concerns with either OpenZFS licensing nor compatibility with other Linuxes running OpenZFS.

[boomboomsubban]

Oracle maintains it's own version of ZFS, which has been separate from OpenZFS since Oracle bought Sun. There us no "Oracle code" in OpenZFS, though some of the patents on techniques are owned by Oracle.

If Oracle wanted to ship ZFS on Linux, they would presumably port over their own version and never involve the OpenZFS team. However, Oracle created btrfs, and seem content to stick with it.

[hnlmorg]

> Oracle maintains it's own version of ZFS, which has been separate from OpenZFS since Oracle bought Sun. There us no "Oracle code" in OpenZFS, though some of the patents on techniques are owned by Oracle.

OpenZFS is a fork of ZFS rather than a reimplementation so I'd be very surprised if there wasn't any Oracle code in it (unless you're making a distinction between Sun and Oracle but legally speaking that would all still be owned by Oracle, hence why I didn't make that same distinction myself).

> If Oracle wanted to ship ZFS on Linux, they would presumably port over their own version and never involve the OpenZFS team.

Porting in this case isn't a simple task as there's a lot of "Solarisims" in ZFS that had to be worked around with the Linux port (ZoL -- ZFS on Linux -- didn't happen over night). Plus, and as I'd said earlier, ZFS and OpenZFS have diverged in terms of supported features so a ZFS volume wouldn't be compatible with an OpenZFS volume. I guess this wouldn't bother Oracle since, like most orgs of that size, they have no qualms with creating vendor lock ins. But it certainly wouldn't do much to sell Oracle Linux to the wider ZoL community.

[boomboomsubban]

>but legally speaking that would all still be owned by Oracle, hence why I didn't make that same distinction myself)..

The reason the distinction is important is that Sun released that code under the CDDL. If Oracle wanted to somehow claim it couldn't be used, it would require a massive lawsuit that would basically be against the concept of free software.

[hnlmorg]

> The reason the distinction is important is that Sun released that code under the CDDL. If Oracle wanted to somehow claim it couldn't be used, it would require a massive lawsuit that would basically be against the concept of free software.

I don't understand why that would be necessary. CDDL (and equivalent) licenses don't transfer ownership of IP (intellectual property) to the public domain, they only outline usage and distribution of the code and compiled artefacts. When Oracle bought Sun, they acquired Sun's IP (amongst other things) -- hence why they could go after Google with regards to their Java IP despite Java being a Sun Microsystems creation. ZFS isn't any different, it might have been distributed under a CDDL license but since Oracle now own the copyright for ZFS code they can legally re-license that code base under another license if they wished. So Sun doesn't factor into the equation any more since what was Sun's is now owned by Oracle.

It's worth noting that you do occasionally see open source projects change their software license years after their initial release. So this isn't an untested theory.

[boomboomsubban]

I'm saying that Oracle couldn't retract the releases already released under a free license, getting rid of OpenZFS altogether. They can and have relicensed the codebase, but we can just pull from the last version released under the CDDL.

From my understanding of open source projects released under a new license, they often can create a similar fork at the license change time where a version exists under the old license too. The exception is if they use the GPL version that allows updating the license

[hnlmorg]

> I'm saying that Oracle couldn't retract the releases already released under a free license

Nobody is suggesting they retract older version. In fact the exact opposite has been said on multiple occasions: any new license would be signified by a semver (semantic version) bump. So you're arguing against a point that was never made in the first place.

> getting rid of OpenZFS altogether

OpenZFS code would be unaffected because it's forked from a version prior to the semver re-license bump.

> From my understanding of open source projects released under a new license, they often can create a similar fork at the license change time where a version exists under the old license too.

Fork or semver bump. Which is exactly what I was talking about. Also notice that what you described there contradicts what you said would happen ("getting rid of OpenZFS") in literally the same comment.

---

If Oracle own the copyright then Oracle can re-license. They'd have to bump the version number and the previous versions with the older license would forever remain CDDL. But legally they can do it and it wouldn't affect OpenZFS licensing (aside that OpenZFS might then no longer be able to incorporate ZFS code -- assuming ZFS's new license is incompatible with CDDL. But things start to get very murky down that road.)

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

This is all true. But also the numerous copyright holders of the Linux kernel could also choose to sue.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

One assumes that if Oracle decided to do its ZFS on Linux, it would do so under an actual compatible license. Since Oracle owns Oracle's ZFS, they can just release it under GPLv2 (or MIT, BSD, whatever) and not be even potentially doing anything that would let someone sue them.

[hnlmorg]

> they can just release it under GPLv2

There is no "just" in "just release it under [another license]". I'd written a detailed rebuttal of why it's not that simple in the GP post to yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24331156

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I did forget the amount of effort to port OracleZFS to work with Linux, true, but I stand by the claim that they could release their own ZFS code under any license they want. They wouldn't have to "contact all 3rd party contributors and get the to agree to a license change", because Sun only took code that was legally signed over to them. The resulting OracleZFS would be missing all OpenZFS code (because indeed that code would only be available under the CDDL), but insofar as that it was missing code that Oracle didn't own it could be licensed at will. This would leave them having to invest the effort to port OracleZFS to run in Linux, which is a valid argument against them taking this approach.

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

Please refer to my OP on the subject..