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by ghaff 1314 days ago
CDDL isn't an especially terrible license in isolation (it's basically Mozilla) but it is generally considered incompatible with GPL which, depending upon which set of 20 year old memories from ex-Sun employees you're inclined to believe, was more or less a deliberately nefarious state of affairs.

Oracle owns most/all of the copyrights and Canonical was willing to take a calculated risk after, presumably, some back-channel discussions. But those companies with something to actually lose from a lawsuit with Oracle or organizations with strong free software principles aren't going anywhere close. Oracle has had a long time to change the license if they actually cared to.

Personally, I find it unfortunate that all the effort that has gone into ZFS as essentially a hobbyist copy-on-write filesystem didn't go into btrfs instead.
2 comments
cmeacham98 1314 days ago
While the CDDL isn't a terrible license in a vacuum, it is (according to its author) _intentionally_ incompatible with the GPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...).

This is, in my opinion, the most important part. It's not some unhappy accident that there are significant legal issues with ZFS and GPL-licenced Linux - that is (allegedly) by design.

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ghaff 1314 days ago
As that section says, there is (at least for public consumption) disagreement among then-Sun employees as to what the intent and beliefs were at the time.

I know all those folks to greater or lesser degrees and Sun was a client of mine as an analyst. There were certainly a lot of conflicting motivations and concerns concerning Solaris and Linux.

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kobalsky 1314 days ago
> I find it unfortunate that all the effort that has gone into ZFS as essentially a hobbyist copy-on-write filesystem didn't go into btrfs instead.

don't some BSDs and Linux share the same code base for ZFS?

Last I heard FreeBSD switched to ZfsOnLinux as upstream a few years ago before it was merged with OpenZFS.

IMO calling it a hobbyist fs is a bit unfair.

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yakak 1314 days ago
Being called hobbyist software derisively by the Linux community is like being knighted, I assume.
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ghaff 1313 days ago
It's not intended to be derisive so much as a simple matter of fact that it's 1.) Not in the mainline kernel; 2.) Isn't supported by most commercial distros; and 3.) Has somewhat ambiguous legal status. For individual use? Knock yourself out. But I wouldn't approve its use for a company unless I had very good and very specific reasons to do so.
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