Re: ZFS with Linux: An Open Plea

Ricardo Correia
2007-04-17T15:06:36Z

Alan Cox wrote:
> The real test of whether Sun were serious about ZFS being anywhere but
> Solaris is what they do to license it - they've patented everything they
> can, and made the code available only under licenses incompatible with
> other OS products. Their intent is quite clear, and quite sad.

That is not quite true. They made ZFS available under the CDDL, which is
an OSI-approved open-source license that is *less* restrictive than the
GPL. The CDDL doesn't prevent anyone from using the ZFS code in
combination with code under other licenses.

The proof of that is that ZFS has already been ported to FreeBSD and
it's being ported to the Mac OS X kernel.

The main problem with ZFS on Linux is that most people consider that the
GPL doesn't allow non-GPL kernel modules.