[Discuss] ZFS

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey)]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Tom Metro
> 
> A more interesting question is whether Oracle has done any code transfer
> from ZFS to Btrfs, now that they own both, and the latter is integrated
> into the Linux kernel. (I haven't read much about either project since
> Oracle acquired Sun.) Or are they keeping ZFS away from open source as
> much as possible, mirroring what they did with Solaris?

ZFS is part of solaris.  Yes it's closed source now.

Open source is great for a lot of situations, but certainly not all.  Here's
what happened with ZFS:  They open-sourced it.  The community didn't
contribute.  They spun off free alternatives and poo-poo'd the upstream
provider.  They got sued and lost, because netapp was able to see the
innards of what they were doing and how they were doing it.  Now they
close-sourced it again.  If you want ZFS, you must either pay snoracle, or
go use one of the forks which have not received significant development
effort in approx 1 year.  If you do go use one of the forks, be aware the
only reason those providers (nexenta, freebsd, illumos, etc) are not getting
sued is because netapp doesn't consider them a serious threat / not worth
while to sue.  Albeit very unlikely, it's conceivable that even consumers
could get sued.  Not just the provider.

The ironic thing is...  Because snoracle lost the ZFS COW lawsuit...  Well
actually they settled.  Which means they paid undisclosed damages, but now
they're immune to further lawsuit on that subject.  So essentially snoracle
has a legal monopoly on ZFS distribution as well as the only (seriously)
active development branch.