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Reiserfs Released

Posted by justin++ on from the btree'd-fs dept.

Kewlname writes "Namesys released Reiserfs for GNU/Linux. The specs and the press release " To think - we get this and beta journaling code in the same week (I hope!). Anyway, I don't know how applicable it is to Reiserfs, but Theodore Ts'o has a paper in the 1998 Linux Expo proceedings about how one might go about introducing B-trees into ext2. It might be interesting to compare this to the design of Reiserfs.

1 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. It's simple. by Trojan · · Score: 3

    If you write a piece of code, you (or your boss) owns the copyright. If you own the copyright you can release it under whatever license you like. For example to the community under a GPL license, and to paying customers under a different license.

    If reiserfs gets included in the kernel, and the kernel developers modify it, these modifications are applied to the GPL'd release, so fall under the GPL again. Reiser won't be able to include these patches in his commercial version (unless he explicitly asks for and gets permission).

    Distributions can include the GPL version. No deals are needed at all. I have no idea where you got that idea from, since GPL is spelled all over it.

    Anyway, just to reiterate, since you're not the only one who doesn't understand (I'm thinking of a certain BSD advocate who recently tried to crush the GPL using very false arguments): if you release your code under the GPL, the GPL only applies to that release. You are still the owner of your code, and you can do with it whatever you want. (But of course you can't retract the release itself.)