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ZFS On Linux - It's Alive!
lymeca writes "LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem's ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incarnation in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there's hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer."
Can't you just make a binary blob kernel module? That is basically what they are doing. In the case of Nvidia they write the binary blob driver and have an OSS driver to interface between the kernel and the blob. In this case ZFS is using FUSE instead of creating it's own interface code into the kernel.
How is it Sun's fault that the GPL is incompatible with anything other than itself?
The Right Thing(tm) is to keep the license as it is. It ensures the Solaris code has to be shared (like the GPL), but doesn't pollute source code around it ( GPL - viral clause = CDDL. Same license as firefox, or apache)
Linux wanting to pillage from the project isn't a good enough reason to make it impossible for people to write non-GPL drivers for Solaris
Why couldn't ZFS be distributed separately in kernel module form and installed by the user? Ubuntu and others integrate mscorefonts, NVidia drivers and others this way. Is the OpenSolaris license so heinous that it's worse than those examples?
I doubt it.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The FSF has used the syscall interface as a guideline to determine whether something is a derived work or not.
I don't believe that's true. I think you're thinking of the explicit exemption Linus put in the COPYING file of the Linux kernel to say that the syscall interface was a GPL interface (there are Linux contributors who disagree to an extent with him on that).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Yes, there are many times when copyright prevents the creation of new works. For example, I can't modify Harry Potter 6 so that Dumbledore doesn't die at the end and re-sell it. At least, not until the copyright expires. Once the copyright expires, you get great works like Wicked and Son of a Witch, both of which are based upon The Wizard Of Oz. Of course, no more copyrights will ever expire, thanks to greedy copyright-holding corporations and a corrupt government.
The idea, though, is that the work which you wish to modify might not have existed at all had copyright not existed. The person who created the work might not have desired to if s/he wasn't going to be able to sell it. Or they might not have been able to devote their lives to their craft, and thus ended up not having enough time to create as much. I highly doubt that the entire library of Stephen King would exist today if he wasn't a professional writer, paid for his craft.
It's obviously impossible to know what might have been, but I think that the reasoning behind copyright (in general) is sound. The problems in the current implementation are that copyright is effectively endless (meaning that the creation of new works based on the original is forever forbidden--forever being the key word) and that fair use rights are going out the window.