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A Short History of Btrfs
diegocgteleline.es writes "Valerie Aurora, a Linux file system developer and ex-ZFS designer, has posted an article with great insight on how Btrfs, the file system that will replace Ext4, was created and how it works. Quoting: 'When it comes to file systems, it's hard to tell truth from rumor from vile slander: the code is so complex, the personalities are so exaggerated, and the users are so angry when they lose their data. You can't even settle things with a battle of the benchmarks: file system workloads vary so wildly that you can make a plausible argument for why any benchmark is either totally irrelevant or crucially important. ... we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Btrfs on many levels — technical, political, personal — and trace it from its origins at a workshop to its current position as Linus's root file system.'"
Zealots, that is who. People so blinded by their ideology that they cannot think about the long-term issues with their license choice.
GPL is okay for end-user stuff, but it is a horrible choice for protocol libraries, programming languages and well, basically any kind of developer used library.
Oh, actually I'm only half right. Sun and other companies use the GPL as a way to tease you into buying their real stuff. Since you can't modify their GPL stuff*, they hope you'll eventually pony up and by their big-boy stuff so you can modify it.
*(well unless you are okay with your own work becoming GPL'd)