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Comment by lomnakkus | Hacker News Reader

Yes, happily the ZFS license (CDDL) and (star)BSD licenses seem to be compatible. Yay for the BSDs of the world!

Unfortunately, most of the OSS/Free Software world is running a Linux kernel whose license (GPLv2) isn't compatible with the CDDL according to current thinking by most of the people who know about these things. End of story, AFAICT. (I mean there's a theoretical possibility of relicensing the Linux kernel, but given the contributor profile it's probably impossible in any practical sense. AFAICT it would be far more likely/practical for ZFS to be re-licensed under a GPL-compatible license if only the corporate overlords were so inclined.)

EDIT: Just a minor edit: I didn't mean that it's "unfortunate" that most of the OSS/Free Software world is running Linux. It works pretty damn well. My "unfortunately" remark was merely about the fact that licenses may be (or are) incompatible.

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> Unfortunately, most of the OSS/Free Software world is running a Linux kernel whose license (GPLv2) isn't compatible with the CDDL according to current thinking by most of the people who know about these things.

This[0] is one of the more interesting reviews of this I've seen in a long time, including what seems like a footnote about dtrace at the end that I thought was a shocker.

[0] https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl...

Yeah, anyone saying this is a cut and dry matter doesn't really have a true appreciation for how murky legal waters can get.

Why must it be relicensed . Why not let it just be . Can the Linux people stop trying to tell everyone that everything needs to be gpl'ed or gpl compatible. It's like a 3 year old wining about how they can't get a second cookie .

I don't think you appreciate the complexities of copyright law as codified in the Berne convention, etc.

(I hate it too, but that's no excuse to just ignore it.)

EDIT: Sorry, I accidentally downvoted you. Apologies.

I work with a guy who has cddl'd his project . He likes the license ; I don't nag him to change it to an isc license . He has his reasons for the cddl, I might not agree with all of it but I am great full he open sourced it . If sun /oracle didn't open source zfs or dtrace we would be all be using Solaris and paying to use it . So if FreeBSD , NetBSD , illumos have a properly compatable licenses for zfs . Embrace that ; if you don't want to, check out dragonflybsd and hammerfs, look at btree on Linux , check out openbfs on haiku . I can't stress this enough Canonical is a shitty company who needs to make waves to stay relevant . I don't know why anyone uses their crap . Wait I remember they are a commercial company with a marketing department who gets paid to polish that turd . What was so bad about Debian ? If you don't like Debian Why not give a a bsd a try . Hell why not just try Smart os and a lx-branded zone . You get zfs , dtrace , and all of the ful of full Linux comparability .

> He has his reasons for the cddl,

What are those reasons, concretely? Would he be better served by choosing e.g. a BSD variant? There's a non-trivial cost to choosing a "not-completely-understood" license. Or, equivalently, there's value in choosing a well-known "standard" license. While the CDDL should probably be classified as "well-known" at this point, its interaction with other licenses isn't, and -- unless you're actively working against GPL-ish licenses -- it's to be avoided. You can get what what you want by chosing a BSD-esque license instead.

I think I agree with many of your other points, though. As I say, I'm not a lawyer and not overly fond of licensing in the first place. (Still doesn't mean you can ignore this concern, unfortunately! If only ignorance of the law were an excuse!)

EDIT: If you're going to downvote, please explain. I don't care about the numbers, but I would like to know why my argument is wrong/misguided.

CDDL has nice properties. And really it's just an improvement on the MPL 1.0. There are good reasons to choose the CDDL (it's a file-based not work-based copyleft so the implications with stuff like linking are clear). It just really bothers me that we have licenses which restrict you from combining two works to create a new works that provides more guarantees of freedom than one of them. It's frustrating that by creating free software we now have different factions because we can't use other's free software.

How quickly we forget that Ubuntu tries to make things as user-friendly as possible. Debian does a decent job, but it's still rough around the edges in the desktop world. The BSDs aren't exactly friendly for non-techies either.

Frankly, you're an elitist, who doesn't care about the use-cases of anyone but technical experts. For most users, the type of filesystem in use does not matter, nor does access to dtrace.

Ha I am an elitist , your too funny; scroll back we are talking about zfs on hacker news; and I made a comment about how I dislike the work of canonical. To the point of making things user friendly; go get an Mac or Windows computer . Compare them to An Ubuntu install . Which is more user friendly? Is it Windows with its start menu and wizards , it's it OS X with its cool style and must have stuff , or is it Ubuntu with its polish of X11 and gnome . I don't know but my personal would probably say it's none of them .

Ah, I see. "X is a shitty company that needs to make waves to stay relevant" was a comment limited to merely the filesystem debate. Then, when it comes to user-friendliness, you abandon the bsds and other linux distros that you were talking about, shifting your goalposts neatly. But it does show your elitism again: user-friendliness should apparently stay away from the FOSS distros and remain the domain of windows/osx.

You were slagging off ubuntu and saying you don't know why people use their shit. I gave you a reason - in fact, ubuntu was responsible for a huge groundswell of interest in open source almost a decade ago, because of that user-friendly focus. That's a core part of why people use their stuff.

Why do you say that about Canonical?

The following answers were particularly applicable at the time Ubuntu came onto the scene.

> What was so bad about Debian ?

1) Unpredictable upgrade cycles. 2)Packages in stable were a bit on the ancient side. Ubuntu LTS is awesome (other projects like Firefox have since copied the fixed release cycle)

> If you don't like Debian Why not give a a bsd a try

Because BSD had (has?) poorer driver support for consumer products (like on my dev laptop)

I don't care much for Canonical and some of their other projects (Unity desktop, Ubuntu One), but Ubuntu as a project is pretty kick-ass. Ubuntu stepped into desktop linux in a big way as other Linux vendors abandoned ship (see RHEL)

Physician heal thyself. It would be optimal if this could be made more clearly gpl compatible as the current owner has a compelling interest in Linux as they now offer their own distro. That said nobody is whining just wishing.

In general, I think it would be most optimal if technical decisions didn't hinge on legal restrictions. GPL makes this less likely because of its absolutionist stance.

It's funny, but you're unintentionally perpetuating what's becoming the new stereotype. Now that the GPL has become mainstream, it's the anti-GPL people who come off as extreme. I'm not saying you're an extremist, but the GPL is not always the root of the problem.

In this case, it's a mutual incompatibility. This is just as much about the CDDL's restrictions as it is the GPL. The CDDL was created after the GPL, and it was an intended incompatibility. The GPL could have been the MIT license and the CDDL might have included a "cannot be distributed with MIT-licensed software" clause.

The point is that now that nobody has an interest in keeping ZFS out of Linux, it's time to relicense! That's all there is to it.

What about Turing and all the other guys that have done and still do great work? Should we end their careers because some of their work is secret? That's just un-australian.

Prove you're a Turing, and there's no problem.

Of course, you can't, which is why you're still following me months later posting impotent comments. I'm staggered how deep this bit, I really must have hit a nerve.

Take back your comment - you're wrong - just because someones work was secret, that doesn't mean their career should be ended.

Or one could simply use FreeBSD because even if ZFS was relicensed the integration of ZFS throughout the Linux ecosystem is nowhere near FreeBSD's.

PC-BSD has made a real effort to make that integration user facing in a nice UI.

But freebsd with zfs isn't BSD licensed. In many ways it's under a much more restrictive license than Linux.

> it would be far more likely/practical for ZFS to be re-licensed under a GPL-compatible license if only the corporate overlords were so inclined.

I feel like that ship has sailed since there's Btrfs for Linux too - which also originated at Oracle.

I've always been curious why they kept working on Btrfs after acquiring Sun since they could've just relicensed ZFS to GPL/whatever.

Then again, I've also always been curious why people still keep glamoring over ZFS for Linux when Btrfs exists now, which, as far as I understand, is comparable to ZFS and a fresh implementation (for what that's worth).

Because ZFS is 100000000000X better than btrfs...

the ZFS commands are more logical, and better designed

The ZFS FileSystem is truely enterprise ready... btrfs is atleast 5 years away from being production ready

btrfs has all kinds of bugs and issues.

zfs did not hold to legacy conventions, they looked at filesystems in a differnet way.

btrfs attempts to hold on the traditional filesystem methodology and shoehorn more modern ideas in to that traditional framework, and IMO it does not work at all

the zfs and zpool commands are brilliant, intuitive, and easy to use.

The btrfs command structure is complicated, non-intuitive, and antiquated

> Then again, I've also always been curious why people still keep glamoring over ZFS for Linux when Btrfs exists now, which, as far as I understand, is comparable to ZFS and a fresh implementation (for what that's worth).

My understanding is that Btrfs is still considered less stable than ZFS, or at least has been fairly recently.

> I feel like that ship has sailed since there's Btrfs for Linux too - which also originated at Oracle.

Unfortunately, I think you may be right. It's just sad -- because probably nobody who's anyone at Oracle cares and/or understands.

It is mostly comparable feature-wise, it's just that it hasn't achieved anywhere near the same level of stability for anything other than single-device usage. (At least that's my understanding from following the mailing list for years and years.)

Bear in mind that many of those who are interested in ZFS are interested in it specifically because they care a lot about not losing data.

With that in mind, let's see what the btrfs wiki has to say about the stability of btrfs:

"Is btrfs stable? Short answer: Maybe."

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_btrfs_stable....

Maybe it's just me, but I'm more than a little concerned by the fact that btrfs has been in development for over 8 years and still doesn't seem to be considered safe to use for storing anything I really care about.

ZFS has a considerable number of very useful features that Btrfs doesn't have. For example, under ZFS, you can delegate administration of a filesystem (subvolume in Btrfs terms) to a normal user. In doing so, you can, for example, set up each user's home directory as its own subvolume, allowing for per-account snapshots, and their own sets of subvolumes which can have differing properties as-needed. ZFS also has support in-driver for sharing volumes, which means nfs shares, and smb shares (unfortunately not under FreeBSD yet) work natively with the filesystem, and can be exported there, instead of needing to muck around with config files and then kicking things in the proper order.

Btrfs is still Not There Yet for a lot of the advantages ZFS has over traditional filesystems. It has a some, and some are half-baked, like its offline deduplication, but is still missing a considerable number. Maybe in five years Btrfs will catch up, but it's not here now.

Rearding licensing, the Linux kernel devs could also relicense to allow for cddl co-existence. Unfortunately, the petulance from such groups as the SFLC makes that very unlikely.

It is comparable in that they are both filesystems... Supposedly the situation has been improving but at least as of months ago compared to zfs performance was horrible, features were lacking, and likelihood of data loss was a lot higher.

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