Reply to post: Re: "acting within the rights granted"

Re: "acting within the rights granted"

The thing is, why wait until a fairly small non-profit outfit such as the Linux Foundation has included it in its kernel when giant corporations with very deep pockets are much more interesting targets?

Apple included their own ZFS implementation for a while in their OS as a secondary (and read-only by default) file system. They chose to develop their own filesystem (APFS) in the end but ZFS was included in their binaries and on their install DVDs for a bit. Apple has unfathomably deep pockets so if it’s money they are after Oracle could have sued Apple years ago. The risk for Oracle might have been that Apple would spend an amount smaller than their catering budget and use it to buy all of Oracle outright.

Canonical will have more money than the Linux Foundation, they offer and support ZFS on Linux (and soon OpenZFS) why not go after them?

Netflix runs their infrastructure on FreeBSD, I bet they use FreeBSD’s ZFS implementation for that. Why not go after Netflix?

The Sony Playstation 5 runs on an adapted version of FreeBSD 12 (i.e. with ZFS binaries included in the base installation). I wouldn’t be surprised if they use a simplified installation of FreeBSD’s ZFS implementation to allow for the easy and automated addition of extra storage that the PS5 allows. Why not go after Sony?

Dozens of multimillion dollar storage appliance companies depend on a flavour of ZFS in their products. Why not go after them?

Probably many hundreds of cloud storage and back up service providers use a flavour of ZFS. Why not go after them?

Those are the targets that Oracle could go after. The bigger question is, on what legal grounds?

The original ZFS code was released in 2005 by Sun under the CDDL license, a well known open source license very similar to the Mozilla Public License and recognised by the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation. When Oracle bought Sun five years later, Oracle’s further contributions to their own ZFS implementation were never open sourced but by then various forks of the open sourced code were already way ahead of Oracle and the rumours are that the entire Oracle department that used to work on ZFS has since closed down.

All the work on OpenZFS by third parties, both by commercial companies and non-profit initiatives is released under the CDDL license. OpenZFS 2.0 is a combination of open sourced code from Illumos, FreeBSD, ZFS on Linux, iXsystems, Nexanta, Delphix and a number of other companies and organisations. All these parties (and Sun in 2005) have willingly and knowingly open sourced their code for other people to legally use.

I get that Linus sees the GPLv2 as incompatible with the CDDL license and as far I know he is right. To use a potential legal threat from Oracle is a straw man, though.