[nimbius]

Oracle laid off basically every Solaris developer in 2017. They are by all observation simply not interersted in the product anymore. its probably the most mournful thing ive seen in tech in a very long time.

OpenZFS is a mighty filesystem hobbled by an absolutely detestable license (the CDDL.) Its greatest single contribution was in all likelyhood to BSD, although it didnt seem to make the OS more popular as a whole.

the latest and greatest from the OpenZFS crowd seems to be bullying Torvalds semi-annually into considering OpenZFS in Linux...which will never happen thanks to CDDL and so the forums devolve into armchair legal discussions of the true implications of CDDL. You'll see a stable BTRFS and a continued effort to polish XFS/LVM/MDRAID before openZFS ever makes a dent.

One could argue OpenZFS is a radioactive byproduct of one of the most lethal forces in open source in the past 20 some years: Oracle. They gobbled up openoffice and MySQL, and went clawing after RedHat just shortly after mindlessly sending Sun to the gallows. Theyre an unmitigated carbunkle on some of the largest corporations in the entire world, surviving solely on perpetual licensing and real-world threat of litigation. That they have a physical product at all in 2023 is a pretty amazing testament to the shambling money-corpse empire of Ellison.

Ultimately the FOSS community under Torvalds is on the right track. Just because Shuttleworth thinks he cant be sued by Oracle for including ZFS in Ubuntu with some hastily reasoned shim doesnt mean Oracle wont nonchalantly send his entire company to the graveyard just for trying. Oracle is a balrog. stay as far away as you can.

[p_l]

Oracle isn't copyright holder for OpenZFS. That's one part that OpenSolaris and OpenZFS projects managed to ensure. What Oracle could do was to close OpenSolaris again under proprietary license, something that Brian Cantrill IIRC blamed on the use of copyright assignment, and that open source projects should never use it - with that as a specific example.

OpenZFS devs have openly declared that no, they are not pushing to include OpenZFS into Linux kernel, and that separate arrangement is just fine, especially since it allows different release cadence and keeps code portable.

Mainly there's an issue with certain Linux Kernel big name(s) that like to use GPL-only exports (something that has uncertain legal status) in a rather blunt way, and sometimes the reasoning is iffy.

[paldepind2]

> Just because Shuttleworth thinks he cant be sued by Oracle for including ZFS in Ubuntu with some hastily reasoned shim doesnt mean Oracle wont nonchalantly send his entire company to the graveyard just for trying.

Canonical has been shipping the kernel with ZFS for more than 7 years and so far they have not been sued by Oracle.

[marcinzm]

Oracle doesn't sue for fun and Canonical isn't exactly a massively successful company financially speaking. However one day it will want something from Canonical and that is the day the lawyers will come out. Possibly once there's IPO money in it's coffers to go after.

[p_l]

Except Oracle has no capability to sue anyone over OpenZFS.

[mardifoufs]

How is the CDDL any more detestable than the GPL family of licenses? Not saying that they are detestable in any way, but the CDDL is also a free software license so I don't get how it's worse or bad

[p_l]

Specifically, the issue is with GPL, which disallows licenses that have more requirements than itself - in case of CDDL, it's IIRC patent sharing requirements and language around file-specific applicability.

And of course then there's the part that GPL doesn't apply to linking at all - it applies to derivative code, which OpenZFS is not and thus it does not violate GPL to ship OpenZFS code linked with Linux kernel.

[avianlyric]

> You'll see a stable BTRFS and a continued effort to polish XFS/LVM/MDRAID before openZFS ever makes a dent.

Right now I would put my money on bcachefs[1] rather than BTRFS. bcachefs is currently in the process of being merged into the kernel and will be in the next kernel release. Doesn't currently quite offer everything ZFS does, but it's very close and already appears more reliable than BTRFS, and once stuff like Erasure Coding is stable, it'll be more flexible than ZFS.

[1] https://bcachefs.org

[exitheone]

I applaud your optimism but the bcachefs install base is tiny compared to btrfs and still there are corruption and data loss stories on Reddit so maybe give it another 5-10 years of mainstream use to stabilize.

I hope it'll beat btrfs eventually though.

[avianlyric]

I’m mostly excited about having access to a filesystem that can happy handle a heterogeneous set of disks with RAID 5/6 style redundancy.

BTRFS RAID-5 implementation has know data loss issues (write hole) that has existed for years now, and doesn’t seem likely to fixed soon.

Then there’s roadmap feature of extending bcachefs native allocation buckets to match up with physical buckets on storage media like SMR drives and also SSDs that expose their underlying NAND arrangement, allowing bcachefs to orchestrate writes in a manner that best fits the target media. Creates the opportunity for bcachefs to get incredibly high performance on SMR drives (compared to FS that don’t understand SMR media), which would probably provide CMR style performance on SMR drives in all but the most random write workloads.

But yeah, there’s still some distance for bcachefs to go. But given its inclusion into mainline, and the fact that mainline only accepts filesystems that have already demonstrated a high level of robustness and completeness (semi-recent policy change driven by experiences with FS like BTRFS which took so long to become complete and stable after merge), gives me hope we won’t need 5-10 years of mainstream use for bcachefs to stabilise.

[MCUmaster]

Oracle can’t do a thing to an Isle of Man corporation.

[rincebrain]

Who on earth is trying to bully Linus into anything? Where have you seen that?

[LanzVonL]

He did go away for a vacation-style treatment a few years ago after offending Intel. Like a re-education camp.

[rincebrain]

He did go away, yes, but that's not really related to the premise of people trying to convince him to merge a large wad of code undera license that is not GPLv2 and is not strictly less restrictive than GPLv2 into the Linux codebase.

[rustcleaner]

This is bull**! It's time for a new license to throw off the old: The Uniform Pirating License! It's a license which you stick on anything which you need a license, and it conveys all rights and zero obligations to you. Possession of the code is sufficient to run, change, and propagate code. Legal system be damned; we have cryptography and Tor, The State's law here is irrelevant (also when did you give The State license to bully you around anyway?)!

My fix: spin up a .onion to host my distribution of the Linux kernel containing ZFS integrated and BtrFS excised, do not answer abuse/legal emails, don't even have email to receive aforementioned emails. What's the pencil-necked shrimpy IP lawyer at Kernel Foundation going to do? Shut down Tor?

[bb88]

There are some very creative solutions for getting around license restrictions.

The LAME mp3 encoder originally was a series of patches that could be applied to the Fraunhaufer ISO dist10 release.

[rustcleaner]

Who cares if ACME Inc can't use the UPL due to corporate risk. It would be charmingly ironic if the world's best filesystem could really only be used by petty home users who can utilize the UPL with near-zero risks...