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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

> ZFS as a first class citizen, without wondering if Oracle will show up and take the ball away.

Is this still true now that FreeBSD is using the ZoL/OpenZFS tree?

If I understand correctly, the licensing issue is around mixing GPL software and CDDL software. I don't think that happens in the ZoL tree, but may happen in distributions that ship the kernel and ZoL together.

Using the ZoL tree with FreeBSD doesn't have the same licensing conflict; BSD and CDDL software can mix.

I think ubuntu has a good argument[1] that it can still be shipped as a separate kernel module and satisfy both licenses.

"The CDDL applies to all files under the CDDL, while the GPLv2 applies to derivative works. The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module — the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system."

[1] https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-licensing-and-linux

The FreeBSD installer provides out of the box options to put the root filesystem on an encrypted ZFS partition. The last I looked into doing root-on-encrypted-ZFS on Linux it was a lot more involved.

I guess my point was the Oracle could still show up and take the ball away -- Linux and FreeBSD are using the same ZFS code base now.

The CDDL license guarantees they can’t. (And it’s probably the only reason they hadn’t.)

Ubuntu 22.04 at least, supports root-on-encrypted-ZFS right from the installer and it worked just fine for me.

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