Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

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.

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/

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.

How many years has it been since Ubuntu started shipping ZFS, purportedly in violation of whatever legal fears the kernel team has? Four years? Five years?

I obviously have nothing like inside knowledge, but I assume the reason there have not been lawsuits over this, is that whoever could bring one (would it be only Oracle?) expects there are even-odds that they would lose? Thus the risk of setting an adverse precedent isn't worth the damages they might be awarded from suing Canonical?

It could be a long term strategy by Oracle to be able to sue IBM and other big companies distributing Linux with ZFS built in. If Oracle want people to use ZFS they can just relicense the code they have copyright on.

Oracle does not have copyright on OpenZFS code - only on the version in Solaris.

The code in OpenZFS and Solaris has diverged after Oracle closed OpenSolaris.

> The code in OpenZFS and Solaris has diverged after Oracle closed OpenSolaris.

Diverged. Not rewritten entirely.

Sure, but Oracle cannot retroactively relicense the code already published before then. The cat's already out of the bag, and as long as the code from before the fork is used according to the original license, it's legal.

I think you might have missed the point.

Yes. Oracle have that copyright.

That's the whole fucking point.

Anything from before the fork is still licensed (and pretty much everything after) is still under the CDDL which is possibly in conflict with the GPL.

Oracle can't do anything. They can't relicense code that was already released as CDDL in any form other than what they did when they closed down Solaris.

The CDDL being unacceptable is the same issue that GPL3 or Apache is unacceptable - unlike GPLv2, CDDL mandates patent licensing as far as the code is considered.

Oracle is the license steward for CDDL, they have the right to release CDDL-2.0 and make it GPL-compatible which users would then be allowed to chose to use. Mozilla did the same thing with MPL-2.0 (CDDL was based on MPL-1.0), though the details are a little more complicated.

Unlike the GPL, the CDDL (and MPL) has an opt-out upgrade clause and all of OpenSolaris (or more accurately, almosf all software under the CDDL) can be upgraded to "CDDL-1.1 OR CDDL-2.0" unilaterally by Oracle even if they do not own the copyrights. See section 4 of the CDDL.

0) Assuming Oracle actually retains the stewardship of license:

1) Making CDDL compatible with GPLv2 puts everyone using CDDL code at mercy of Oracle patents

2) OpenZFS is actually not required to upgrade, and the team has indicated they won't. So you end up with a fork you need to carry yourself. Might even force OpenZFS to ensure that it's specifically 1.0.

Ultimately it means Oracle can't do much with this.