Given bcachefs' cheeky strapline "The COW filesystem for Linux that won't eat your data" (clearly referring to btrfs' spotty record of reliability and data loss), it's understandable the btrfs people are feeling triggered, that doesn't excuse the passive-aggressive obstacles those who are gatekeepers for kernel FS code have been using to stall adoption of bcachefs in the kernel.
ZFS is the only other alternative to bcachefs (a rock-solid one, albeit not license-compatible), which is why it's mentioned.
Omg how after all this time are people still fucking repeating this 'not license-compatible' nonsense. This is one of this myths that at some point has infected the OpenSource community and its so totally wrong and damaging.
Its not license incompatible, many, many, many organizations have shipped ZFS as part of the distribution and absolutely nobody ever sued or even threatened sue over the license.
Linus didn't want to merge it because of some vague fear of Oracle and how they sued over Java, but that was about API not license.
What Linus should have done is to simple upstream it. If some big company (IBM or whoever) wants to not 'risk' ZFS then they should damn well do their own work and remove it. There is no reason that the waste majority of the Linux community should be denied great features (ZFS, DTrace and friends) over some vague fear of Oracle.
CDDL means ZFS can't be incorporated into the Linux kernel as opposed to a distribution. That does have impacts as in when the kernel makes breaking changes in the internal vfs structures used by ZoL. Oracle could change that at the stoke of a pen, but chose not to, for whatever reason.
I don't think fear of Oracle is the issue, more likely just an irrational rejection of everything Sun and Solaris. After all btrfs also originated in Oracle (what's worse, despicable Oracle itself, not via the Sun acquisition).
Perhaps Oracle's unwillingness to relicense is simply that Oracle knows how inferior btrfs and thus doesn't mind giving it away by licensing it GPLv2, but ZFS is much more valuable and they want to keep the rights to it as potential competitive advantage. If Sun hadn't licensed ZFS CDDL before the acquisition, I'm pretty sure Oracle would be happy to keep it closed-source.
I hope bcachefs makes it into the kernel quickly, that distros drop btrfs and that its infiltrators are turfed out of kernel-land, but that's probably too much to hope for. In the meantime, I am happy to keep running ZFS for all my critical data on Illumos, Alpine and Ubuntu.
If you can legally distributed then there is no reason it can't be linked into the main kernel.
> I don't think fear of Oracle is the issue
Why then did Linus say exactly that?
> After all btrfs also originated in Oracle (what's worse, despicable Oracle itself, not via the Sun acquisition).
Wrong. It was simply a guy that worked for Oracle, it wasn't an Oracle project.
> Perhaps Oracle's unwillingness to relicense is simply that
It doesn't matter what Oracle once, of course they don't want anything to do with ti. The community has forked ZFS long ago and Oracle has no power what so ever to reliance most of that code.
Literally nobody wants the Oracle proprietary ZFS anyway.
I obviously share your frustration! I have long viewed these bogus licensing claims as the open source variant of NIH syndrome,[0] complete with the conjuring of both fear and grievance that always makes for particularly virulent thinking among the orthodox.
But the license claims aren't bogus – or at least not all of them? For example the CDDL states that you can't add additional restrictions, but if you combine it with the GPL then the GPL also applies, so that's an "additional restriction", no?
Of course, all of this is highly legalistic and in spirit the CDDL and GPL are essentially identical, and from that perspective any lawsuit would be complete bollocks, but ... bollocks lawsuits do happen.
There's lots of claims about GPL and CDDL compatibility floating around and much of it sounds at least plausible and it's all a bit controversial. Clearing up this sort of confusion is exactly the sort of scenario where courts come in to play. So it seems to me that fears of a lawsuit are not entirely unreasonable.
Do you want to put all your money and the future development of Linux at risk? The nature of lawsuits in the US means that as soon as the lawsuit is filed you've lost already, and the ruling just decides if you've lost even harder.
Not denying Linux can have its share of NIH, but I see this mostly as a matter of risk management. e.g. Canonical has decided to take that risk, which is fair and reasonable, but Linus decided to not take that risk, which is also fair and reasonable.
Of course the entire situation is ridiculous; btrfs is partly sponsored by Oracle, and Oracle is also sitting on a perfectly functional filesystem they can just relicense like they did with dtrace. I don't know what's preventing Oracle from doing that.
Why then does Canonical and many other places link it with the kernel and distribute it. Canonical stated there is no issue.
If you really believe there is a license issue go ahead and start suing people and see how far you get with that.
> So it seems to me that fears of a lawsuit are not entirely unreasonable.
And yet lots cooperation shipped code and products with ZFS and Linux with no issue what so ever for many, many years now.
> Do you want to put all your money and the future development of Linux at risk?
Its not a risk for Linux at all. Its a risk for a company that distributes Linux with ZFS in it. If a company for some reason believes that there might be an issue and they don't want it, then they can feel free to remove it.
My guess is that 99.9% of companies will simply use Linux with ZFS in it.
> Linus decided to not take that risk, which is also fair and reasonable
He could just say he would merge it, and unless half the large cooperations in the world jump on him to stop him there is no reason to not merge it. But he didn't do it, he just reject it out of hand based on some vague 'maybe oracle' something. Did he consult a lawyers?
Lots of lawyers have said it's probably incompatible. Is it? Who knows. You're saying it's all nonsense, which seems quite a far-fetched claim. I find it hard to see how anyone could defend any other answer than "it's presently unclear", possibly followed by "but it's probably (in)?compatible".
That distros haven't been sued yet seems meaningless. Granted, Oracle has been a bit better in recent years, but people haven't forgotten Oracle v. Google, SCO v. {everyone}, USL v. BSDi, etc. One of the lessons is that you can never know who will own some piece of copyright or IP in the future and what they will do with it. Oracle could off-load all of the Solaris stuff to some copyright troll tomorrow.
But it doesn't really matter who is right or wrong here or if it is or isn't compatible: there's enough of a dispute for lawsuits, and they're going to be costly and a headache anyway.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I fully understand why the code can't be incorporated as is. Then again, workarounds were found for things like the proprietary nVidia drivers, and the unwillingness to do so for an arguably far superior filesystem reeks of NIH.
Hi Bryan! Yes, NIH is the most likely explanation, since btrfs was accepted depite originating from deepest, darkest Oracle (and I happen to share your dim opinion of them).
ZFS is the only other alternative to bcachefs (a rock-solid one, albeit not license-compatible), which is why it's mentioned.