SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 25, 2016 17:52 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801)
In reply to: SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux by JoeBuck
Parent article: SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

I imagine the path of least resistance would be for Oracle to dual license ZFS. That said, we have a hint at what Oracle's strategy may be, in that DTrace was made available for Oracle's Linux.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 25, 2016 19:11 UTC (Thu) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link] (8 responses)

I guess that one of the reasons for Oracle to *not* dual license could be to prevent that there are two incompatible versions of the file system because someone makes changes available only under GPLv2 making it impossible for them to incorporate the changes into Solaris. A CLA would be a solution to this particular problem, but there will likely be resistance to that as well.

I guess that the easiest solution would be to just avoid ZFS on Linux for now if you intended to distribute.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 25, 2016 19:52 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] (6 responses)

How often does dual licensing create incompatible forks due to one of the licenses?

Per your second point, nobody does anything "enterprise" with Linux and ZFS. Sure you can get the two to work together, but you're on your own. If Ubuntu ships a compiled ZFS kmod that could create trouble for downstream distros (and Ubuntu), but would be the closest Linux+ZFS has approaching real support.

It's not looking good for ZFS on Linux if Oracle is to be counted on to make things right.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 25, 2016 20:44 UTC (Thu) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh, I never said anything about enterprise and Linux. I said things about Solaris. I could very well imagine that Oracle would not change the license so people would not contribute GPLv2 only patches that they then could not merge back into *Solaris*. What Oracle wants to do with Solaris and their code is their choice. If they don't want to dual license to prevent people creating an incompatible GPLv2 only fork that's up to them (note: not saying that this is their motivation but I could imagine it is).

So I am just going to sit back and see what happens. It will be interesting.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 25, 2016 21:29 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Well sure, but I don't think there's much of a precedent to using dual licensing to screw over only one license consumer. If Oracle wanted ZFS to be only applicable to Solaris, there would be no need to dual/relicense at all. Status-quo. If you wanted to futz with licenses to be advantageous to your cause, you could license relatively permissively but require contributions to be signed over or otherwise usable for your proprietary purposes.

ZFS is cool, no doubt about it. That said, LVM isn't too shabby. Will ZFS continue to be relevant if Oracle keeps holding it back?

Re: nobody does anything "enterprise" with Linux and ZFS

Posted Feb 25, 2016 23:50 UTC (Thu) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]

“Enterprise” seems to have become a synonym for “trapped in a morass of legacy infotech”, a.k.a “dinosaur”.

The average lifetime of a company on the Fortune 500 is now down to 18 years. Innovation stands still for no-one, least of all the “enterprise”.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 26, 2016 13:23 UTC (Fri) by kloczek (guest, #6391) [Link] (1 responses)

Seems you really don't understand that ZFS it is not network driver but huge piece of technology which is still evolving and comparing ZFS case to any previous dual licensing cases is not correct way of thinking about this case.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 26, 2016 15:09 UTC (Fri) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Are you sure ZFS isn't a network driver? You sure are clever.

Oracle can make this right. Per my comment, I don't think they wish to.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 26, 2016 14:25 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> How often does dual licensing create incompatible forks due to one of the licenses?

Right now the Oracle ZFS shipped with Solaris is incompatible with the OpenZFS implementation. Oracle didn't stop developing ZFS after they stopped doing code releases.

SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

Posted Feb 25, 2016 21:42 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I don't know about Oracle, but avoiding the (perceived at least) hazards of dual-licensing was *definitely* a factor in Suns' decisions on OpenSolaris licensing. I think Bryan Cantrill and (for sure) Simon Phipps are on record on that (see the video of Phipps at a Debian workshop, e.g., linked to from the CDDL wikipedia page).