[Discuss] ZFS

[matt at ciranttechnologies.com]

> ZFS has been integrated into the FreeBSD kernel (as I'm sure you know),
> and despite being a less lucrative target for patent suits, is
> theoretically subject to the same patent infringement liability, yet I
> haven't heard of Sun/Oracle pursuing that.
>

ZFS was released under the CDDL license, which is open source but grants
the owner to close source the software.  That's what Oracle did with
Solaris, but there is no ground for infringement suits, because everything
released as open source remains in the community.

The ability to close source it is, I believe, what makes it incompatible
with GPL.

OpenSolaris was also forked to OpenIndiana and Ilumos.

I have used Solaris 11 Express to build a few storage devices for NFS,
CIFS and iSCSI sharing with very positive results, so you don't have to go
with a fork to use ZFS.

Matt Iavarone
Cirant Technologies