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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

At this point, what's Oracle getting from not making ZFS GPL?

They have their own RHEL derivative, would it make life easier for them as well (having an external community committed to keeping ZFS in the kernel tree)?

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In my opinion, it is because they are freaking Orcale, they don't do anything for free. Heck they recently started charging for the Java runtime. Some that has been free for over 20 years.

I really hate to say this, but I wish IBM had bought Sun instead of Oracle. Even better I really wish Sun had managed to pivot and stay an independent company.

> Heck they recently started charging for the Java runtime.

On the contrary, they've open sourced the entire JDK for the first time ever, and are now offering the same JDK either completely free or with paid support, rather than the mixed free/commercial JDK as before. (I work at Oracle on OpenJDK, but speak only for myself)

Though I still run into software which doesn't like OpenJDK, complaining that the jar file was compiled with a newer version (and I have the latest OpenJDK version) which I assume means it wants the Oracle Java SE application.

It depends on which version you're using. As of JDK 11, OpenJDK and Oracle Java SE are the same.

I'm on OpenJDK 11.0, but I still get a "...compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 53.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0..." error.

JDK 11 supports class file version up to and including 55 (either OpenJDK or Oracle JDK, which is the same JDK under a different license).

Hmm...I wonder if the Java .jar in question is doing something funky, since I am running v11.

I thought if you used the Oracle JDK for commercial purposes you would be required to buy it from Oracle.

Now if OpenJDK is kept at parity with the OracleJDK that could work.

Not defending Oracle here, but I wanted to add some clarity.

Oracle will now only support current LTS versions of the Oracle JDK (as opposed to the OpenJDK), for something like 2 years. Basically requiring people to migrate to LTS releases relatively quickly.

If you can’t (larger orgs and others with requirements that delay those moves), then you’ll need to pay Oracle for a license.

Java (Oracle/Sun JDK) has never really been free, specifically, while I never worked with it, embedded JDK has always required a purchased license for distribution. The OpenJDK, on the other hand is a free OSS licensed distribution of Java.

In practice it doesn't really work like that. The vast majority of devs and companies using Java were not using an embedded JDK.

So for them, it's moving from a freely available JDK supported for many years, to a JDK that's changing every 6 months.

And the dust is far from settling on which alternative OpenJDK build is stable, reliable and free, long term.

I know that companies should pay for it, but things don't really work like that, see the OpenSSL fiasco.

At this point it may not even help. OpenZFS forked from Oracle ZFS like 10 years ago, so even if Oracle dual licensed it as GPL, the OpenZFS folks with a decade of non-Oracle code contributions, would have to contact every contributor for permission to re-license as well.

Starting with this would help.

Didn't VLC do this? It's not impossible.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Relicensing-VLC-to-th...

> They have their own RHEL derivative, would it make life easier for them as well (having an external community committed to keeping ZFS in the kernel tree)?

Oracle Linux uses Btrfs, and Oracle as a company puts more resources into Btrfs than they do ZFS.

They've been committed to Btrfs for almost a decade now, and they're continuing to improve that filesystem and make it solid for their use-cases and their customers.

Well, I must say, they're not really doing that good of a job. Btrfs is still largely less stable than even ZoL git snapshots in almost every possible way.

Hell no, first class support for ZFS is a selling point, if it was GPL customers could go elsewhere to get that.

They don't seem to be offering that for OEL though.

Well, making it GPL is not necessary, just GPL compatible.

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