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FOSS and multiple competing commercial interestsFOSS and multiple competing commercial interestsPosted Oct 14, 2008 23:57 UTC (Tue) by masoncl (subscriber, #47138)In reply to: FOSS and multiple competing commercial interests by kripkenstein Parent article: Linux Summit will preview new advanced file system (SearchEnterpriseLinux.com)
Btrfs has already been released under the same GPLv2 license used by most of the kernel. It has a number of copyright holders outside of Oracle already as well.
Having multiple companies involved definitely helps lower the cost of Btrfs, but that's only a small part of the reason why I tried to get distros and partners on board once I was sure btrfs would work.
Btrfs isn't a specialized FS, it is aiming at a general purpose market with a very broad user base. Pulling in partners and involving them in the design and development allows us to make a better filesystem, and makes it more likely they will ship and support the end result.
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FOSS and multiple competing commercial interests Posted Oct 15, 2008 5:09 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
Thanks for the information. It does make a lot of sense that involving more parties will lead to more adoption.
Can you comment more specifically about the choice of GPLv2 instead of a more permissive license (which might have led to even greater adoption, albeit outside of Linux)?
FOSS and multiple competing commercial interests Posted Oct 15, 2008 13:19 UTC (Wed) by masoncl (subscriber, #47138) [Link]
The Linux filesystems copy quite a bit of code and ideas between themselves. Btrfs includes code from ext2, ext3, reiserfs and xfs, and this wouldn't be possible if I had chosen a different license.
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