On 07/02/2024 11:11, J. Roeleveld wrote:
On Tuesday, February 6, 2024 9:27:35 PM CET Wols Lists wrote:
On 06/02/2024 13:12, J. Roeleveld wrote:
Clearly Oracle likes this state of affairs. Either that, or they are
encumbered in some way from just GPLing the ZFS code. Since they on
paper own the code for both projects it seems crazy to me that this
situation persists.
GPL is not necessarily the best license for releasing code. I've got some
private projects that I could publish. But before I do that, I'd have to
decide on a License. I would prefer something other than GPL.
Okay. What do you want to achieve. Let's just lump licences into two
categories to start with and ask the question "Who do you want to free?"
I want my code to be usable by anyone, but don't want anyone to fork it and
start making money off of it without giving me a fair share.
Okay, that instantly says you want a copyleft licence. So you're stuck
with a GPL-style licence, and if they want to include it in a commercial
closed source product, they need to come back to you and dual licence it.
Personally, I'd go the MPL2 route, but that's my choice. It might not
suit you. But to achieve what you want, you need a copyleft, GPL-style
licence.
If that sounds weird, it's because both Copyleft and Permissive claim to
be free, but have completely different target audiences. Once you've
answered that question, it'll make choosing a licence so much easier.
GPL gives freedom to the END USER. It's intended to protect the users of
your program from being held to ransom.
That's not how the kernel devs handle the GPL. They use it to remove choice
from the end user (me) to use what I want (ZFS).
And it's that which I don't like about the GPL.
No. That's Oracle's fault. The kernel devs can't include ZFS in linux,
because Oracle (or rather Sun, at the time, I believe) deliberately
*designed* the ZFS licence to be incompatible with the GPL.
After all, there's nothing stopping *you* from combining Linux and ZFS,
it's just that somebody else can't do that for you, and then give you
the resulting binary.
At the end of the day, if someone wants to be an arsehole, there's not a
lot you can do to stop them, and with ZFS that honour apparently goes to
Sun.
Cheers,
Wol
