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Comment by 23david | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. CoreOS is managing their own distro, so why not just package in ZFS and get it over with.

It's been how many years now waiting for the next great ZFS competitor? If nobody is able to improve on ZFS, how about we just all jump on the bandwagon and move on with our lives?

If nothing else, having more people using ZFS may inspire someone to actually improve on it. BTRFS has such a limited feature set in comparison to ZFS that with the advent of ZFS on Linux, it's really hard to understand the community's continued backing of BTRFS as the Linux community's CoW filesystem competitor to ZFS. Spend a few weeks using ZFS on Linux on a machine with a few SSDs and a few HDDs, or just enable it on a linux laptop with a SSD drive, and it's hard to go back to anything else.

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Because sun decided to sabotage it when they released it and oracle haven't stepped back yet.

Sabotage? How, exactly? I have heard of no major corruption or performance bugs in ZFS, what am I missing?

licensing

From http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

"ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), and the Linux kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2). While both are free open source licenses they are restrictive licenses. The combination of them causes problems because it prevents using pieces of code exclusively available under one license with pieces of code exclusively available under the other in the same binary. "

as others have said below. the CDDL or 'cuddle' license as some chose to pronounce it. Is incompatible with the GPL, which means two things.

1 - We can't just take the code and add it to the kernel. 2 - The patent and other legal grants in the licence won't apply if we try to reverse engineer a compatible GPL2 equivalent for the kernel to use, which will be a HUGE risk for the few companies that would probably consider the cost of reverse engineering worth it. And before you say it can be done without company support. I have 2 things to say, hows that going for the ReiserFS 4 fans who wanted to keep improving that, and in order to continue the work on ZFS effectively, the existing ZFS developers have 'ganged up' and now try to work on everything so that the openzfs project can be a single source of truth for the ZFS source code, and a reverse engineered version would be very unlikely to benefit from this, and would therefore require even more developer time just keeping up with the improvements 'upstream' in ZFS from the 'original' ZFS codebase.

  In the case of the kernel, this prevents us from distributing ZFS as part of 
  the kernel binary. However, there is nothing in either license that prevents 
  distributing it in the form of a binary module or in the form of source code.

Source: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

  ZFS cannot be added to Linux directly because the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. 
  ZFS can, however, be distributed as a DKMS package separate from the main kernel package.

Source: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS

So why not just distribute the DKMS package with a distro? Easy enough. Will it ruin the user experience somehow?

The license for ZFS is still CDDL

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