Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 5, 2023 7:20 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules by shemminger
Parent article: Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

How will freeing ZFS cause Oracle to make more money than they do now?

This is not an idle question. If it doesn't make them any money, then they will not do it. See discussion in https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2085 for more information.

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 5, 2023 9:03 UTC (Sat) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link] (5 responses)

How much does Oracle Linux compete with non-Linux OSes, and how much is it in a space where we've won?

Traditionally, ZFS was a reason to buy Solaris, but with that going end-of-life in 2034, very few enterprises are going to do fresh installs on Solaris. ZFS is no longer a killer feature for Solaris.

But if ZFS is a first-class filesystem on Oracle Linux, that might encourage clients to buy support from Oracle even if other distros have it. It would certainly help sell Oracle Linux instead of Windows.

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 5, 2023 19:10 UTC (Sat) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (4 responses)

Oracle Linux does not ship ZFS.

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 7, 2023 12:47 UTC (Mon) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

And Oracle Linux has no USP over other Linux distributions, except that you can get support from the same company that supports your database if you're unfortunate enough to have an Oracle database.

I'm saying that it would be worth Oracle's while to allow ZFS into the Linux kernel and support it on Oracle Linux: this wouldn't negatively affect commercial Solaris (since its days are numbered), but would benefit Linux in general and Oracle Linux in particular.

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 8, 2023 16:42 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

This is the irony, Oracle can't ship ZFS with Linux cause of the licence.

This is also the answer to NYKevin's question: Oracle could make more money by relicensing ZFS to be GPL compatible as that would allow them to ship ZFS with Oracle Linux, and market it as "We invented it, so we can support it best!".

The slight problem there is that a lot of ZFS on Linux development has been done outside of Solaris, and most (all?) of the Sun ZFS developers have long left Sun/Oracle.

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 11, 2023 16:34 UTC (Fri) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] (1 responses)

CDDL has an upgrade clause, so in fact they can relicense it. However, in doing so they would also be relicensing everything else that's under CDDL 1.0 (that doesn't say "no license upgrades").

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 11, 2023 18:38 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

They could special-case the GPL compatibility in a similar way to GFDL 1.3 existing to allow Wikipedia to relicense to CC.