GFS released under the GPL [LWN.net]

GFS released under the GPL

Posted Jun 28, 2004 5:50 UTC (Mon) by daniel (subscriber, #3181)
In reply to: GFS released under the GPL by treed
Parent article: GFS released under the GPL

GFS *used* to be GPL. Then Sistina (mistakenly IMHO) went proprietary with it.

Indeed, _your_ opinion. I'm not so sure. GFS's tour of duty as a proprietary filesystem has helped it gain the fit and finish needed to work productively under commercial workloads. We're just very lucky that events fell out so that all that work came back to the community.

Unfortunately now we have OpenGFS and regular GFS to deal with. Hopefully they will merge again.

Speaking as an honorary member of the Open GFS team, we have already as much as merged. As we speak, Brian Jackson, our fearless leader, has prepared a GFS package for Gentoo, ready to be emerged. (I think somebody else even beat him to that, but you get the idea.) There will be more announcements on this and other interesting topics in the next few days, please stay tuned.

So, let's let the hacking begin. And oh, by the way, clusters are loads of fun.

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GFS released under the GPL

Posted Jun 28, 2004 9:14 UTC (Mon) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link]

GFS's tour of duty as a proprietary filesystem has helped it gain the fit and finish needed to work productively under commercial workloads.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, are you suggesting that GPL / Open Source software does not usually have the "fit and finish to work productively under commercial workloads"? The manner in wich you pose the comment suggests that GFS would otherwise not be in such good shape.....

GFS released under the GPL

Posted Jun 28, 2004 15:17 UTC (Mon) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

No, he's suggesting that while it was proprietary, Sistina was able to devote more resources to developing it, because there was a direct cash stream associated with it.

Yes, there is a lot of good, reliable, free software. Some of it took a long time to get that way, because the developers simply could not devote the necessary timei to the project. Also, often the "final polish" part of a project, where you catch all the corner cases, is tedious and non-glamerous. It's lot more fun to start a new project, and since you're doing it for fun anyway, there's no incentive to get the last 1% right.

It's all well and good to be in favor of free software. I believe that in the end, you do have a better result, but it can take a while to get there, and ignoring that fact while rah-rah-rahing free software does no one any good.