Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 19, 2023 1:22 UTC (Mon) by developer122 (guest, #152928)
In reply to: Merging bcachefs by khim
Parent article: Merging bcachefs

>Yet ZFS was made non-portable on-purpose. It's an open question whether ZFS license actually makes it's impossible to merge it into Linux, but it was designed to make that impossible and Linux developers and users generally respect wishes of ZFS principal authors.

>And they couldn't claim that they only accept filesystems with non-copyleft licenses, because AFAIK none of ZFS versions are released under non-copyleft licenses.

>It's really their own decision whether they want to use it or not.

This again? You realise this decision was made something like 20 years ago, right?

You might was well get a shovel, because Sun Microsystems has been dead for over a decade. If you have beef with the specific format in which Sun's legal department gave away their entire operating system Free to the world, you better start digging.

The modern steward of OpenZFS isn't Sun and it isn't Oracle. They're an independent project that forked the codebase.

ZFS is in fact very portable, currently actively supported by it's principal authors on three (3) OSs, with two (2) more on the way. All facilitated by the CDDL.

The CDDL is a weak per-file Free Software Copyleft licence, as recognized by the FSF.*

It fits just fine with BSD etc because the CDDL doesn't impose any restrictions on the other files in a codebase, and neither does the BSD licence. Furthermore, the CDDL doesn't impose restrictions on the licence of the resulting binary that gets distributed. Thus, so long as you aren't trying to merge ZFS into the FreeBSD codebase there's no issue, and TBH that would kinda defeat the spirit of sharing the OpenZFS codebase and it's ongoing new feature development across 4 different operating systems. (OpenSolaris (now illumos) doesn't have any problems because of course it's CDDL too.)

Unfortunately, while the CDDL doesn't have *any* problems with the GPL (and both licences carry the same spirit), various analysts believe the reverse isn't true due to subtle incompatibilities between the terms. So ZFS is stuck as a non-GPL kernel module. Sorry.

*https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CDDL

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Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 19, 2023 8:07 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

> This again? You realise this decision was made something like 20 years ago, right?

The BSD has used gcc for compiling for 20 years. They are not as hostile to the GPL as you imply.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 19, 2023 10:44 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The BSD folks hate GPL with passion. They used GCC because it was “the only game in town” and switched to Clang when it became usable. Same thing as Apple or Google.

For some reason BSD folks like when their code is used by SONY or other companies who contribute nothing back, but hate it when their code is used in GPLed projects and demand that GPLed projects would allow them to get stuff and give it to other proprietary companies on a silver plate. But it's unclear why bcachefs developers have to facilitate that.

And as much as I don't like “freedom fighters” who try to kill proprietary software and hurt end user instead I have even less sympathy for people who try to take free software and turn it proprietary.

Proprietary companies have lots of money and lots of developers. Let them write what they want or need themselves if they don't want to play by rules.