Why open source isn’t working
I’ve been reading a lot lately about why ZFS, the filesystem developed by Sun Microsystems, is so important to users of Mac OSX. It all sounds great! I want ZFS! oh wait… Windows doesn’t support it? Linux uses a userland hack? Linux can’t boot from it?
Why?!?! I thought Linux and ZFS were both open source?
Oh… Licensing. :-\
Well… isn’t the point of open source software to innovate without legal formalities? Since ZFS is so revolutionary, and Linux so widespread, why can’t Sun tweak their license to allow for ZFS inclusion in the Linux Kernel? Or, can Sun… just once… fork the code and hand it over to Linus Torvalds under the WTF Public License?
ZFS, with all it’s fancy features and redundancy would easily become the filesystem of choice for Server Admins, business users, and the small yet dedicated home userbase.
So what needs to be done?
- Modify the GPL and/or CDDL so that code can be shared between the two licenses
- Code ZFS into the Linux Kernel
- Code ZFS support into GRUB and LILO
- Code fsck and similar utilities for ZFS support
DO IT!
oh… have I mentioned how much I love Firefox’s spellcheck feature?
Merry Christmas!