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Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

(lwn.net)
222 points ksec | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 13:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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betaby ◴[30 Aug 25 17:49 UTC] No.45076609[source]▶
The sad part, that despite the years of the development BTRS never reached the parity with ZFS. And yesterday's news "Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job." see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta

There is no 'modern' ZFS-like fs in Linux nowadays.

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tw04 ◴[31 Aug 25 03:05 UTC] No.45080011[source]▶
There's literally ZFS-on-linux and it works great. And yes, I will once again say Linus is completely wrong about ZFS and the multiple times he's spoken about it, it's abundantly clear he's never used it or bothered to spend any time researching its features and functionality.

https://zfsonlinux.org/

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evanjrowley ◴[31 Aug 25 03:11 UTC] No.45080040[source]▶
Sometimes I wonder how someone so talented could be so wrong about ZFS, and it makes me wonder if his negative responses to ZFS discussions could be a way of creating plausible deniability in case Oracle's lawyers ever learn how to spell ZFS.
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aaronmdjones ◴[31 Aug 25 14:17 UTC] No.45083316[source]▶
As far as I know, the license incompatibility is on the GPL side of the equation. As in, shipping a kernel with the ZoL functionality is a violation of the GPL, not the CDDL. Thus, Oracle would not be able to sue Canonical (Edit: or, rather, have any reasonable expectation of winning this battle), as they have no standing. A copyright holder of some materially significant portion of the GPL code of the kernel would have to sue Canonical for breaching the GPL by including CDDL code.

I am not a lawyer.

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1. cyphar ◴[01 Sep 25 04:00 UTC] No.45089320[source]▶
The Software Freedom Conservancy did a legal analysis and concluded that the incompatibility comes from both sides[1]. This also applies to the pre-2.0 MPL that CDDL was based on.

A lot of people focus on the fact that the CDDL allows binaries to be arbitrarily licensed so long as you provide the sources, but the issue is that the GPL requires that the source code of both combined and derived works be under the GPL and the CDDL requires that the source code be under the CDDL (i.e., the source code cannot be sublicensed). This means that (if you concluded that OpenZFS is a derived work of Linux or that it is a combined work when shipped as a kernel module) a combination may be a violation of both licenses.

However, the real question is whether a judge would look at two open source licenses that are incompatible due to a technicality and would conclude that Oracle is suffering actual harm (even though OpenZFS has decades of modifications from the Oracle version). They might also consider that Oracle themselves released DTrace (also under the CDDL) for their Linux distribution in 2012 as proof that Oracle doesn't consider it to be license violation either. If we did see Canonical get sued, maybe we'd finally be able to find out through discovery if the CDDL was intentionally designed to be GPL incompatible or not (a very contentious topic).

[1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/