[Sanzig]

Sun is dead and the ZFS copyright transferred to Oracle who then turned it into a closed source product.

The modern OpenZFS project is not part of Oracle, it's a community fork from the last open source version. OpenZFS is what people think of when they say ZFS, it's the version with support for Linux (contributed in large part by work done at Lawrence Livermore).

The OpenZFS project still has to continue using the CDDL license that Sun originally used. The opinion of the Linux team is the CDDL is not GPL compatible, which is what prevents it from being mainlined in Linux (it should be noted not everyone shares this view, but obviously nobody wants to test it in court).

It's very frustrating when people ascribe malice to the OpenZFS team for having an incompatible license. I am sure they would happily change it to something GPL compatible if they could, but their hands are tied: since it's a derivative work of Sun's ZFS, the only one with the power to do that is Oracle, and good luck getting them to agree to that when they're still selling closed source ZFS for enterprise.

[chasil]

The battle for ZFS could easily now devolve to IBM and Oracle.

Making /home into a btrfs filesystem would be an opening salvo.

IBM now controls Oracle's premier OS. That is leverage.

[sho_hn]

Several large distros use btrfs for /home.

[chasil]

Oracle databases absolutely cannot.