Thomas Mueller <[email protected]> wrote: > On the issue of whether ZFS can be shipped with the Linux kernel, FreeBSD > includes ZFS with the kernel, binary and source. > > So does that mean it would be OK for Linux too? > > FreeBSD has a different license (BSD) than Linux (GPL 2 or 3).
For FreeBSD, things are less easy than for Linux. FreeBSD comes with a license that gives real freedom and the CDDL being copyleft, is a license that intentionally limits the freedom a bit in order to achieve other benefits. The GPL limits freedom in a way far beyond what the CDDl does. Adding code (ZFS) that gives more freedom than the base project (Linux) is easy... It however was a real challenge for me to convince the FreeBSD people in early 2006 to add something to their code that reduces the freedom of the FreeBSD project. I succeeded because I could explain them that ZFS is not code that is _needed_ in order to run FreeBSD - you just could use their UFS variant instead. The same arguments worked for integrating DTrace into FreeBSD. Jörg -- EMail:[email protected] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [email protected] (uni) [email protected] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
