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by lonelygirl15a 1211 days ago
I seem to recall that Sun put ZFS under a license that has been deemed incompatible with the GPL by pretty much everyone except Canonical, and so that it can't be integrated with the kernel but must remain a "bolt-on" for legal reasons.

It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.
3 comments
ghaff 1211 days ago
Why would they if they haven't already? It's not like Canonical has a lot of money. But, yes, anyone else who Oracle might actually elect to sue won't go anywhere near ZFS.
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bombcar 1211 days ago
Likely because they want to keep that powder dry until someone with deep pockets gets involved, Microsoft, or IBM or someone.

Because there's a moderate change that it goes against them.

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ghaff 1211 days ago
Btrfs has also been improving. Certainly not for all use cases but it's the default for desktop Fedora now and some Synology NASs use it, among others.
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bombcar 1211 days ago
On one hand ZFS has held down btrfs because "why bother" when you already have something that does much of what you want, but on the other hand it shows what can be done.

I hope btrfs becomes quite stable and usable.

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bombcar 1211 days ago
Yeah, but even if bolt it on (which Ubuntu does for you, any other distro it's easy to do) it's still a "bolt-on" that doesn't integrate as fully as it could if it were the native filesystem, allowing full system rollback, snapshotting, boot management, etc.

It's similar to the "polish" available on macOS or Windows, Linux has all the pieces but you have to assemble them yourselves, even today.

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nix23 1210 days ago
Oracle itself deploys DTRACE with it's Oracle Linux.

That whole CDDL/GPL incompatibility is BS.

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nullnix 1210 days ago
This would be a more convincing argument if your facts weren't over half a decade out of date. DTrace for Linux was relicensed under the UPL (with kernel components under GPLv2, just like the kernel) way back in 2017.

(speaking as the guy who wrote the scripts to change all the license text, though the actual relicensing was due to a lot of work on my boss's part.)

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nix23 1210 days ago
Well true but Oracle Linux included DTRACE for more then half a decade.

And canonical includes ZFS, and i think they have more lawyers then you and me.

Do you really think they would take that risk especially with oracle to include ZFS (that is not even their main fs)?

Have some commonsense.

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