[johncolanduoni]

Well they’d have to write their own driver anyway for one. If they were going to take an existing design and write a new driver, ZFS would be the better choice by far. Much longer and broader operational history and much better documentation.

[MadnessASAP]

And you might not get sued by Oracle! RedoxOS seems to use the MIT license while OpenZFS is under the CDDL. Given Oracles litigious nature they'd have to make sure none of their code looked like OpenZFS code, even better make sure any of the developers had ever even looked at the ZFS code.

Its much better to hope that OpenZFS decides to create a RedoxOS implementation themselves then to try and make a clean room ZFS implementation.

[johncolanduoni]

Fair enough, though you can’t really understand how BTRFS works without reading the GPLed Linux source while ZFS has some separate disk format documentation. Don’t know that anyone would sue you though.

[MadnessASAP]

Its not unreasonable to look at the source code to understand the disk format to then create an independent driver. So long as you are not directly copying code (or in this case, paraphrasing C to Rust.)

More importantly though, Linux or the Linux Foundation are unlikely to file a lawsuit without clear evidence of infringement, whereas Oracle by their nature will have filed lawsuits and a dozen motions if they catch even a whiff of possible infringement.

I wouldn't touch Oracle IP with a 50' fibreglass pole while wearing rubber boots.

[p_l]

Oracle can't exactly sue them this way, and CDDL is remarkably less litigation-oriented than some other licenses.

[MadnessASAP]

Its certainly not as bad as some licences but there are still some gotchas to the CDDL. The 2 big ones here (AFAICT) is it's not compatible with MIT, and any reimplementation of CDDL code would not have the patent protections of the original.

Also, and again, the validity of a lawsuit isn't going to stop Oracle from filing it.