zfs is licensed too freely to be in-tree, but it’s still an excellent choice.
Apache v2 and GPLv3 were made explicitly compatible while providing different kinds of freedom.
It's not really. Many aspects of the license are free-er, but that's not what causes the incompatibility. The GPL does not have any kind of clause saying code that is distributed under too permissive of a license may not be incorporated into a derived/combined work. It's not that it's weak copyleft, it is that it contains particular restrictions that makes it incompatible with GPL's restrictions.
BSD licenses do not have that incompatible restriction (= are freer than CDDL, in that aspect) and can be compatible with the GPL.
Some have argued that this may not actually constitute an incompatibility, but not many are keen to "fuck around and find out" with Oracle's lawyers. So here we are.
Oracle could spend 10 minutes and clear this up, but the fact they don't should be fear enough about any large company shipping with OpenZFS code.
See Oracle vs Google
That said, they did relicense DTrace to GPL a few years back. but I don't really know the details on that, or how hard it was, or if that's also possible for OpenZFS.
When I publish code I don't pick any license. It's just free for anyone to use for whatever. I don't like the GPL for this, it's way too complicated. I don't want to deal with that.
It's a shame some legal BS like that is holding back the deployment of a great filesystem like ZFS.
That's not good in all cases as in some jurisdictions it means that any use is forbidden...
It's also really only a big thing in the US. Here in Europe things are usually settled amicably and the courts frown on people taking up their time with bullshit. They only really get involved if all else fails and only really for businesses. Nobody really cares about software licensing except the top 200 companies.
I'm admittedly a bit biased though. Unfortunately I sometimes have to deal with our internal legal dept. in the US (I'm based in Europe) and I find them such nasty people to deal with. Always really pushy. This made me hate them and their trade.
In Windows, Satya would need to write Larry a check. It would probably be hefty.
Edit: there was a time that this was planned for MacOS.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-ap...
That was a joyous prospect. A single volume manager/filesystem across all UNIX platforms would be wonderful.
We had the UNIX wars of the 1990s. Since Linux won, they have been replaced by the filesystem wars.
I see no reason for the down votes.
_Windows Drivers work the same way and nobody huffs and puffs about that_
I'd love to have an intelligent discussion on how one person's opinion on licensing issues stacks up against the legal teams of half the fortune 50's. Licensing doesn't work on "well, I didn't mean it THAT way."
> Warning: Occasionally, the dkms package might not compile against the newest kernel packages in Arch. Using the linux-lts kernel may provide better compatibility with out-of-tree kernel modules, otherwise zfs-dkms-staging-gitAUR backports compatibility patches and fixes for the latest kernel package in Arch on top of the stable zfs branch
So... my system might fail to boot after updates. If I use linux-lts, it might break less often. Or I can use zfs-dkms-staging-git, and my system might break even less often... or more often, because it looks like that's installing kernel modules directly from the master branch of some repo.
As a practical matter I could care less if my system fails to boot because of "license issues" or some other reason, I just want the lawyers to sort their shit out so I don't have to risk my system becoming unbootable at some random inopportune time. Until then, I've never hit a btrfs bug, so I'm going to keep on using it for every new build.
When it comes to filesystems, I very much appreciate the "it just works" experience – not having a working filesystem is not having a working system and it a pain to solve.
Again, all of this has been a while. Maybe it's better now and I'm not opposed to trying, but I consider "having to use DKMS" to be a downside of ZFS.