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3 votes c/freepost Posted by jaxmax — 3 votes, 1 commentsSource

My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?

Commenters on Phoronix call this speculative or dude-bro. It’s neither.

1) “Speculation. The creators of ZFS are human beings like Matt Ahrens who clearly does want it to run on Linux.”

Yes, but they don’t hold Sun’s copyright, Oracle does. Sun could have just used GPL, or they could have licensed under (GPL or CDDL). They didn’t, and this was an active choice with some strategy in mind. Oracle does the same thing, they can resolve this at any point by relicensing. The ZOL authors outside Oracle would follow, for sure. In fact, it would be great if they could dual-license their contributions already (maybe they even do, I haven’t checked).

I don’t even understand what this GPL-labeled or not-GPL-labeled export nonsense is about. Linux is GPL, and that’s it. Proprietary or license-incompatible kernel code doesn’t belong there, it’s only allowed because the license holders of Linux collectively decide to allow it and not to sue. I understand the pragmatic reasons, and I guess the export labeling is about considering certain things internal and leading to derivative code, and certain things a public API. But the public API of Linux is the userspace API – the syscalls and the filesystem hooks.

2) “Despite Linux’s new code of conduct, & Linus “turning over a new leaf” etc., it’s clear that it will take a generation before the dude-bro-ism slowly works its way out of their culture.”

This has nothing to do with codes of conduct, discrimination or bullying. It is simply the case that things that are unfit to be included in Linux, for licensing or other reasons, are in no position to dictate which direction Linux development should or should not go. It’s great if Linux people would like to accomodate ZOL, but the ball isn’t in Linux’s court.