Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD’s ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base.
ZFS – almost another casualty of Larry Ellison. I’m damn glad it’s managed to live on.
Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD’s ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base.
ZFS – almost another casualty of Larry Ellison. I’m damn glad it’s managed to live on.
All the energy spent on BTRFS might have contributed to OpenZFS in a big way. I like competition, and I admire the work *Sun* did to build the ZFS. It was revolutionary back in time.
But the current management is making it essentially a dead end product. Apple gave up on it, Linux cannot include it, and even OpenZFS work is causing three duplicates: ZFS commercial, OpenZFS and BTRFS.
So what’s the alternative?
winter,
Clearly, it’s a new FS standard that incorporates the best of each and pleases everyone. We can call it kumbaya FS 🙂
Actually I’m pretty sure that BTRFS would have been considered a completely redundant effort for linux if it weren’t for the licensing incompatibilities. I doubt BTRFS would have come about if we could have taken ZFS as is. Everyone can recognize the current situation isn’t ideal, and I’m sure some people just want to ignore the licensing differences. Personally I think ideally OpenZFS would be placed under a dual license, however I don’t know that the linux kernel project would authorize changes to be upstreamed back into OpenZFS.
Consider that if a developer submits patches to the OpenZFS project directly, they could require that code to be CDDL/GPL2 dual licensed and there would be no problem. However if a developer instead submits patches to the linux kernel project, those are generally taken under GPL2 only. Over time you’ll get a lot of linux developers who haven’t explicitly consented to license the code modifications under CDDL, so the changes are stuck in linux and can’t be merged back into the official OpenZFS project.
Most people, including developers submitting patches, just think of open source as being a universal concept and they don’t really care that much about license subtleties. but others are extremely pedantic about the licensing. The reality is that in court that stuff matters.
As a FreeBSD user I am rather glad that it can’t be merged into linux. About it being a dead end, I think ext4 could be called a dead end as well, but as long as such systems work and there is someone doing maintenance, who cares.
pfgbsd,
That’s an interesting comment, but you don’t provide a sense for “why”. Would you elaborate?
I don’t mean to speak for the other poster. But when I was involved with FreeBSD, there was a lot of distrust among that community regarding linux, since a lot of their desktop stuff ended up depending on linuxisms. I assume there is a fear that by ZFS becoming more integrated within the linux infrastructure, that it will be “polluted” by linuxims (sic) as well.
It’s a pity, because FreeBSD lacks the manpower and number of “eyes” that linux gets, and it would significantly improve/evolve the codebase for ZFS.
As it is right now, there is a sensible effort to keep the core of the implementation portable among different OSs. When a filesystem, like XFS which used to work on a commercial UNIX, gets ported to linux there is no care about blowing away non-linux interfaces and breaking existing functionality. Ir also happens that linux has starting imposing GPL-compatible only interfaces and such intromision of licensing into what should otherwise be only technical decision-taking is not something BSD developers want to do.
I should add that the current ZFSonLinux devs are a pretty nice community that manages to keep their heads clear and accommodate rather well with other development groups.
It was a casualty of Sun’s mismanagement, Google torpedoing Sun with their Android screwover and no one else willing to buy Sun besides Oracle (IBM did an offer that they quickly withdraw), not even Google after their mischief.
Thanks for sharing!