forthright != Linus

Posted Jun 13, 2007 0:03 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330)
In reply to: forthright != Linus by qu1j0t3
Parent article: Linus on GPLv3 and ZFS

The issue with Sun is not that they prefer a particular license, but that they are choosing to license patents only to code that uses their particular license, while IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others are licensing a number of patents (or in Red Hat's case, all their patents) to developers who use a much larger set of open source licenses.

to post comments

okay but,

Posted Jun 13, 2007 0:21 UTC (Wed) by qu1j0t3 (guest, #25786) [Link] (4 responses)

This still does not fully explain to me why, to date, kernel devs aren't looking dispassionately as the affordances of ZFS and how they might have them without stepping on anyone's patent*. Max V. Yudin recently asked on zfs-discuss,

... is it legal to write ZFS clone from scratch while maintaining binary compatibility with original?
Jeff mentioned in his blog that Sun filled 56 patents on ZFS related technologies. Can anybody from the company provide me with more information about this?
If porting ZFS to Linux kernel is not an option and I were to implement different file system with ZFS ideas in mind how can I be safe and not break any Sun patents?

There has been no meaningful resolution of his questions. At least it may prove that, thanks to software patents, interesting development is now impossible. So much for stimulating innovation...

* - I suppose NetApp has patents too, but perhaps Linus wishes to imply that they would be more tractable to deal with than Sun (maybe he actually knows somebody @ NetApp). Let's dream for a moment, and imagine that Linus and Jonathan, over a piña colada one Sunday, work out a magical way to free ZFS for kernel inclusion. That would be a P/R coup for Sun an order of magnitude greater than even the Apple buzz. Since Solaris 10 famously runs on all varieties of hardware (IBM, HP, Dell, even Macs), I don't seriously think Jonathan believes this would damage hardware sales. Then again, I only have the ponytail, not an MBA, and my bonuses are a few zeroes short of his. ;-)

okay but,

Posted Jun 13, 2007 7:57 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (2 responses)

One could always start from Sun's GPLv2 ZFS code in GRUB. And Jonathon Schwartz has just posted saying Linux ZFS would have full patent indemnity.

okay but,

Posted Jun 13, 2007 9:38 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

That said "GPL v2 or later" if I read correctly. I didn't take the time to read the code, but presumably that is only code for reading and would not affect potential patents on writing parts.

On another note, if Sun make Solaris GPL3 and accept external contributions, it might get tricky to keep parts (i.e. ZFS) under another licence.

okay but,

Posted Jun 13, 2007 19:51 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

note that the zfs code released for grub is not enough to actually be able to write to the filesystem, just enough for grub to be able to find the files that it needs.

Netapp and patents

Posted Jun 22, 2007 7:10 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

I suppose NetApp has patents too, but perhaps Linus wishes to imply that they would be more tractable to deal with than Sun

Yes, Netapp has patents, and they caused Daniel Phillips to stop working on the tux2 filesystem; I have not followed the story enough to know if Netapp did anything other than file the patents to achieve this result.

Netapp's WAFL is not very interesting for Linux anyway, because it requires special NVRAM hardware to buffer writes during some of the more time-consuming operations (e.g., snapshot creation). I don't think that this hardware dependence can be eliminated without major changes to the WAFL code.

Concerning not breaking Sun patents, you can look for older sources where similar ideas have been described, e.g., various papers on log-structured file systems, e.g., our Freenix 2000 paper, or (maybe too young) my file system ideas.