This Monday, ZFS on Linux lead developer Brian Behlendorf published the OpenZFS 2.0.0 release to GitHub. Along with quite a lot of new features, the announcement brings an end to the former distinction between “ZFS on Linux” and ZFS elsewhere (for example, on FreeBSD). This move has been a long time coming—the FreeBSD community laid out its side of the roadmap two years ago—but this is the release that makes it official.
A massive release.
It still has a license mismatch with linux, which prevents bundled distribution?
iampivot,
Last I heard nothing has changed on this front, Ubuntu says it’s ok to distribute with linux as a module. I think many people have mixed feelings about this. Logically if we accept that modules don’t have to be GPL compatible in this case, then it becomes harder to argue that they should be GPL compatible in other cases. I’m not sure if this hypocrisy is legally significant or not because a license holder probably has the right to selectively enforce a license. However the problem here is that ubuntu is not the license holder, they are (mostly) a licensee as far as the GPL is concerned. Given that it’s all open source, I don’t think anyone really wants to fight over it, but it does make you wonder if it could somehow spell legal trouble in the future.
I’ve also been surprised by what Ubuntu is doing. I guess if it’s not part of the same source package/repository and distributed in separate binary packages then maybe it’s OK ?
Lennie,
The license incompatibility is one of the reasons I was avoiding ZFS under linux, but maybe I just have to get with it. I’m skeptical that btrfs will catch up to it at this point.
The main issue is whether a system is using a component covered by copyright and the system counts as a derived work. I don’t know enough about the law to comment nor do most technical people if truth be told. Anything else such as whether it is or isn’t included is a political discussion more to do with NIH and attitude than the merit of anything. This does seem to be the crux of the issue and a squabble which will go on forever and a day until either the courts rule or people bury the hatchet.
The performance improvements have not been highlighted enough. I have been using the same hardware setup for a couple years and the monthly disc scrub process went from 90 hours down to under 8 hours and the system load was also slashed during the run. Just astonishing work from the development team.