Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net> wrote: > Once upon a time, Chuck Munro <chuckm at seafoam.net> said: > > I have a question that has been puzzling me for some time ... what > > is the reason RedHat chose to go with btrfs rather than working with > > the ZFS-on-Linux folks (now OpenZFS)? Is it a licensing issue, > > political, etc? > > Licensing. Sun chose an Open Source license that is incompatible with > the GPLv2 as used by the Linux kernel, so it is not legally possible to This is an infamous insinuation that has been verified as being false by the prople who know better (e.g. Simon Phipps). Correct is: - The Sun developers had threatened to leave Sun in case Sun would use the BSD license for OpenSolaris. So BSD was not possible. - The GPL is not free enough to make it usable for OpenSolaris. So the GPL was not possible. - The license chosen (the CDDL) gives maximum compatibility to other licenses. BTW: I have been involved in the discussions for the license selection and I can verify as well that you are the victim of a fairy tale. > distribute a combined work of the kernel and the Sun ZFS code (at least > that's the opinion of a number of lawyers, including Red Hat's; not all Name us a single credible lawyer that made this claim..... In contrary, well-known lawyers (e.g. the lawyers of Harald Welte) explained why a combination of a filesystem with the Linux kernel is not problem. > The only legal way to use ZFS natively under Linux would be to not use > any of the Sun code and reimplement ZFS from scratch for Linux. That > would be a large job. With this funny claim, you just again verify that you are uninformed. If you reimplement the code (even though there is no legal need to do so) you _create_ a legal problem as only the original code includes the patent grant from the CDDL. If you reimplement the code, you need to pay royalities for the patents. If you like to use legal free code, you _need_ to use the original implementation. Jörg -- EMail:joerg at schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/'