I thought btrfs was going nowhere for a while because it seemed way behind zfs for a long time.
But now it looks like it's catching up, and has some nice userspace tools, and some features that I don't even think zfs has (like the option to do overwrite-in-place, but you give up checksums/compression).
The user tools seem worse than zfs, but it does look like btrfs will be a leading filesystem soon.
I wouldn't say soon. Btrfs needs much more robust userspace tools. At the moment, the tools tell you nothing, and recovery is basically impossible. I have lost data several times now. While I had backups since I was using btrfs, I didn't expect to lose data the way that I did. The drive filled up with metadata, and since it didn't have anywhere to rebalance the metadata it couldn't move it, and even if I deleted files it wouldn't make a difference. It happened to me on two occasions. The interesting thing is that btrfs filesystem df showed I only had 80gb total, with a 120gb drive. Decided to go back to xfs for that drive, and I use zfs for my raidz2 array.
They absolutely can ship it. They choose not to. There is a big difference.
It's what happens when ideology is allowed to trump technology, and it is sad.
The fact that various distros ship not-open video card drivers shows that for some things, there's a willingness to compromise. This is far "worse" than shipping an open source module, or open source code that is compiled into a module on install, either of which could be done for ZFS.
The non-free drivers are allowed to be redistributed by the copyright holders. The reason to not distribute them would be ideological.
Linux and ZFS's licenses are incompatible, which would make it illegal to distribute them together. Both ZFS and Linux copyright owners could choose to sue any entity that would distribute Linux with ZFS support.
You take quite a logical leap from "licenses are incompatible" to "illegal to distribute them together." I'd love to know what led you to that conclusion.
As I said to the other poster, you're just spreading FUD.
If the licenses are incompatible, then you cannot ship them together. Calling that FUD is a bit rich! Try going through the process at Fedora. The legal team will stop you.
Licenses allow you to distribute things despite copyright. Usually distributing software without a license is illegal, though there are exceptions in some countries for music and movies.
You can obviously nitpick about that he uses "illegal". However, the discussion was about why ZFS is not distributed. That is what the answer was about, incompatible licenses making it (somewhat) impossible for distributions to carry it.
Now various distributions do have e.g. "nonfree" repositories, but incompatible licenses are a big problem. Responding to such concerns with "just spreading FUD" seems to (hopefully) indicate you're not involved with any distribution.
Dude, that's literally what "licenses are incompatible" means.
The GPL gives you a license to distribute IF AND ONLY IF all the linked binaries have AT LEAST the same permissive rights as the GPL mandates. The CDDL gives rights SIMILAR to GPL, but in a way that is incompatible, i.e. which does not let you distribute CDDL code with all the permissions the GPL mandates. As such, you void the license to distribute the GPL code, as you're unable to comply with the GPL license (i.e. the bit that all linked binaries have at least the GPL enforced liberties).
The GPL's license to distribute is dependent on you distributing binaries with the appropriate permissions and the CDDL won't let you.
Shipping non-open graphics drivers together with the linux kernel is a violation of the GPL. Providing non-open binaries separately from the linux kernel is not. The GPL only applies to distribution, if you're not distributing GPL code (for instance, only your non-open drivers) there's no problem.
The GPL puts no restrictions on use, i.e. once you've got both linux and your non-open drivers the GPL doesn't care whether you combine the two.
Additionally, as people point out the license can only be enforced by copyright holders, so if no linux copyright owners bother to sue people distributing non-open drivers, nothing will happen.
This is however rather shaky legal ground, as at any point you could get sued for violating the license. This also why linux doesn't ship ZFS, since the CDDL is incompatible with GPL any company distributing linux with ZFS would open itself to a potential lawsuit by any linux copyright holder. You can imagine most companies are not very happy taking this risk.
With regards to Richard Yao's comments, of course he's not worried. Copyright violation (which is what breaking the GPL is) only lets you sue for monetary damages or to stop the distribution. There's zero reason for people to sue most linux distros as they're non-profits that aren't charging for distribution. Since it's nearly impossible to show monetary loss by a linux copyright holder (it's being distributed for free!) The only thing to possibly do would be to sue the distros into ceasing distribution, which seems an undesirable outcome for most linux copyright holders, so that's unlikely to be enforced.
Since GPL doesn't restrict actual usage the users of these distros have nothing to worry about anyway.
In summary, you only have to worry about being sued if you are both violating the GPL and making some sort of money while doing it. But the fact that you probably won't get sued doesn't mean that what you are doing is not illegal.
- Well, in any country that's signed the Berne Convention, anyway.
There is no issue with non-free drivers, since they are explicitly licensed by the copyright owner to be redistributable by anyone and they explicitly installed/enabled by users, so Linux's license is also satisfied.
ZFS could be shipped in a similar manner to drivers, by requiring explicit user action to enable (I believe this is what Gentoo are doing). However, it makes a lot less sense for a filesystem, since the switching costs are much higher than for a graphics driver.
While Linux copyright owners generally allow the (small) breach of GPL that is shipping GPL-incompatible modules (whereas it would be entirely fine if they were installed separately) and the driver copyright owners also explicitly allow redistribution, ZFS's copyright owners have made no such allowance.
It would at least breach ZFS's license to ship it.
Please provide reasoning why you think it's "illegal." Otherwise, you're just spreading FUD, which is the whole reason for people believing a Linux distribution can't ship ZFS on Linux in the first place.
Please provide reasoning how it is ok to distribute it. CDDL is incompatible with GPL. Distributing that would allow your distribution to be sued for copyright violation.
Apart from that, e.g. each time you update your kernel you would have to recompile the modules for that specific kernel. ZFS is also an FS and i wouldn’t want to play jeopardy every time i do an update.
You depend on people outside your distribution to keep up, otherwise it might break when you upgrade your kernel. It's also basically in a perpetual beta.
