Quicksearch
Disclaimer
The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.
One thing i hate at Linux
Friday, April 20. 2007
There is one thing, that i hate at Linux: It´s ability to transform brilliant and intelligent people to totally narrowminded people when there is something that goes not the way of Linux. A nice example is this discussion in the linux kernel mailing list: Linux: ZFS, Licenses and Patents. Whenever someone does something, that prevents the Linux community from integrating something, it´s because of "they fear linux". Utter bullshit. The world seems to be a simple one from the view of a linux developer. Sun is not against the GPL. At the end we released Java (one of our core assets) with GPL. GPLing a language is a good thing, to ensure that any change to the language will go into the source base again.
In the world of operating environments, it´s a different story: The Linux community has to learn that the world is bigger than Linux, and that you don´t choose your open source licence to be at best use of the GPL-driven community of Linux. There are so many reasons not to use GPL like allowing developers not to give back changes to the source and none of them has to do with "feared of linux". BSD has an running ZFS port, MacOS X will use ZFS. You can use ist, when you want. It´s perfectly possible for other open source projects with other licenses. Same for dtrace. There is a running port in MacOS X, too. But at least the later one wouldn´t possible when all your changes has to redistributed.
As i´m stated before in some posts: The GPL centric view of Linux and the community (Kris, i fully understand the reasoning of GPL and Linux, we´ve discussed that already) will be the biggest risk for the long term prospects of Linux from an economic point of view. I strongly believe, that we need an interface license between GPL and other licences, that allows all these open source projects to work together without prefering the mindset of a single party in this field.
PS: At the end ... why should we donate ZFS to IBM
In the world of operating environments, it´s a different story: The Linux community has to learn that the world is bigger than Linux, and that you don´t choose your open source licence to be at best use of the GPL-driven community of Linux. There are so many reasons not to use GPL like allowing developers not to give back changes to the source and none of them has to do with "feared of linux". BSD has an running ZFS port, MacOS X will use ZFS. You can use ist, when you want. It´s perfectly possible for other open source projects with other licenses. Same for dtrace. There is a running port in MacOS X, too. But at least the later one wouldn´t possible when all your changes has to redistributed.
As i´m stated before in some posts: The GPL centric view of Linux and the community (Kris, i fully understand the reasoning of GPL and Linux, we´ve discussed that already) will be the biggest risk for the long term prospects of Linux from an economic point of view. I strongly believe, that we need an interface license between GPL and other licences, that allows all these open source projects to work together without prefering the mindset of a single party in this field.
PS: At the end ... why should we donate ZFS to IBM
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
I absolutelly agree with your remarks. If the linux community won't finally take of it's blinders (like you know... "everything that's not linux is evil"), I don't see a big future for linux in the economy - then it'll always stay at it's niche existence.
Doomshammer: Don't sell Linux short to make your point. If Linux is a just "niche OS," then so is Solaris, FreeBSD and Darwin.
That said, I do hope that some solution can be reached regarding ZFS on Linux. The GPL is not evil (although some of its proponets can be rather arrogant), but it is also not the only way to do things.
Frankly, I don't understand why a port of ZFS can't be distributed as separate kernel module. NVIDIA and ATI distribute kernel modules for their graphics cards with far more restrictive licenses than the CDDL. The same could be done for ZFS.
Purists will whine, and they are free not to use it, of course. The module also would not be able to live inside the kernel source tree, but again, in today's world of package managers, who cares? If installing ZFS is just a call to "apt-get install zfs-module", that is good enough for me.
That said, I do hope that some solution can be reached regarding ZFS on Linux. The GPL is not evil (although some of its proponets can be rather arrogant), but it is also not the only way to do things.
Frankly, I don't understand why a port of ZFS can't be distributed as separate kernel module. NVIDIA and ATI distribute kernel modules for their graphics cards with far more restrictive licenses than the CDDL. The same could be done for ZFS.
Purists will whine, and they are free not to use it, of course. The module also would not be able to live inside the kernel source tree, but again, in today's world of package managers, who cares? If installing ZFS is just a call to "apt-get install zfs-module", that is good enough for me.
@Stan: Sorry if you misunderstood my point, but I didn't "rant" on Linux as OS but on the community and missionaries behind it.
You obviously didn't understand Stan's point:
Linux and it's community doesn't need to worry if it will "stay at it's niche existence" (your words) - it grew out of the niche years ago and already is one of the major operating systems right now.
Linux and it's community doesn't need to worry if it will "stay at it's niche existence" (your words) - it grew out of the niche years ago and already is one of the major operating systems right now.
I think, no operating system came out of it´s niche, with the exception of Windows Kudos to Microsoft to place a mediocre desktop operating system as a even more mediocre server system with such a success .... this is real marketing
Commercial Unix system still dominates the high end. And my personal opinion: This won´t change any time soon. My personal experience at customer sites shows a migration back to commercial unixes and real server hardware. Linux has it´s stronghold in the 1-2 Proc market. Both are marginalities in the desktop market. MacOS X grews big time in the desktop market, but in the server market you will find it only rarely.
Kudos to Microsoft to place a mediocre desktop operating system as a even more mediocre server system with such a success .... this is real marketing Commercial Unix system still dominates the high end. And my personal opinion: This won´t change any time soon. My personal experience at customer sites shows a migration back to commercial unixes and real server hardware. Linux has it´s stronghold in the 1-2 Proc market. Both are marginalities in the desktop market. MacOS X grews big time in the desktop market, but in the server market you will find it only rarely.
Hmmm... I am not sure what to think of that... Two ideas:
Last solution (and I have to agree with Stan here) could be building/redistributing ZFS for Linux as "contributed" ("non-free" in terms of GPL) module living outside the "regular" kernel source tree. This possibly is not the best of all solutions but, given it is maintained well, it indeed might work.
Given that Sun indeed decides to move forth cross-licensing OpenSolaris using GPLv3 and the Linux kernel sooner or later also might adopt this version of that license, I think all these problems could be null and void after all. Other way 'round, in case OpenSolaris will move to GPLv3 while having Linux forced to stay with v2. SUN is likely to have a growing support by "Free Software" (capital F) advocates who indeed see that GPLv3 is addressing issues not covered so far in v2, which could overally make OpenSolaris here what Linux used to be in the late 1990s - an "alternative platform" to be used by those who don't want to go with "the mainstream".
I'd consider the latter one a good thing... let's wait and see.
Cheers,
Kris
Last solution (and I have to agree with Stan here) could be building/redistributing ZFS for Linux as "contributed" ("non-free" in terms of GPL) module living outside the "regular" kernel source tree. This possibly is not the best of all solutions but, given it is maintained well, it indeed might work.
Given that Sun indeed decides to move forth cross-licensing OpenSolaris using GPLv3 and the Linux kernel sooner or later also might adopt this version of that license, I think all these problems could be null and void after all. Other way 'round, in case OpenSolaris will move to GPLv3 while having Linux forced to stay with v2. SUN is likely to have a growing support by "Free Software" (capital F) advocates who indeed see that GPLv3 is addressing issues not covered so far in v2, which could overally make OpenSolaris here what Linux used to be in the late 1990s - an "alternative platform" to be used by those who don't want to go with "the mainstream".
I'd consider the latter one a good thing... let's wait and see.
Cheers,
Kris
(by the way... I intended to make enumeration bullets rather than having the first paragraph of the comment marked up as "bold"... sorry )
)
+1
The LKSF book
The book with the consolidated Less known Solaris Tutorials is available for download here
Web 2.0
Contact
Networking
xing.com
LinkedIn
Facebook
My photos
- mail: joerg@c0t0d0s0.org
- icq: 144000169
- Me, myself and I
- openBC
- My del.icio.us
- c0t0d0s0@twitter
- c0t0d0s0@last.fm
- wiki@c0t0d0s0
- Amazon Wishlist
Networking
xing.com
My photos
Comments
about Nanosecond
Wed, 23.05.2012 00:11
I remember this being drummed
into us during Digital Design
at Uni. It's important to cons
ider it when laying out [...]
Mon, 21.05.2012 18:04
Hello Kevin, Im not surprised
with what you are seeing or ha
ve seen when attaching a SSD t
o a USB2.0. USB3.0 helps [...]
Mon, 21.05.2012 04:44
Hi Greg,
With regards to IO
PS I have seen terrible result
s using a 60GB SATA2 SSD with
USB2.0 - USB2 really cho [...]
about ZFS Dedup Internals
Sat, 19.05.2012 09:50
There is no impact to boot/imp
ort times, as the DDT is loade
d as needed ... so the pool is
imported as fast as wit [...]
Buttons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License
