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On Tuesday 25 November 2008 11:07:26 Joerg Schilling wrote: |
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> It ZFS was under GPL, it did not appear on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. |
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> |
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> What I expect from a promising new filesystem is that is may be integrated |
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> in a large variety of Platforms. |
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> |
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> Note that I am a supporter of collaboration in OSS and that it is important |
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> for me to write software in a highly portable way so anybody may use it.... |
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> |
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> I do not like the camp mentality. |
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I used to be a totally-GPL fan but I changed my stance a few years back. The |
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thing that did it for me was the TCP/IP stack. If this were not BSD licensed, |
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it would not have been adopted as widely as it was, and we would not have an |
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internet today. So keeping in mind that the GPL was designed to be used to |
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create a free-standing body of free code that comprised an entire Unix-like |
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system, I now advocate the following: |
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Low level code that is intended to be used everywhere - on the order of |
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filesystems, networking standards, block devices and such - ideally should be |
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BSD licensed. Then anyone anywhere can use it. |
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GPL in userland is fine, as apps tend to be free-standing and do not conflict |
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with other code, hence the "mere-aggregation" clause. |
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Kernel modules are different and cannot work this way. Expect in very unusual |
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circumstances (eg XFS in the linux kernel) they are derivative works and the |
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GPL kicks in. Which is fine, most people will contribute their changes back |
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upstream anyway just like GPL demands. But GPL is incompatible with other |
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licenses which prohibits equal two-way sharing. The easiest possible solution |
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as I see it is to just license this low-level utility code as BSD. |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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