Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Monday 24 November 2008 23:47:14 Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 04:41:14PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > > btrfs looks very promising. I hope it will become a good fs. Fast for
> > > everybody, stable, efficient. We will see. Until then I will stay with
> > > r4+compression.
> >
> > Well, it is under a restrictive license, so there is no chance that this
> > filestem will become popular on many OS platforms.
>
> btrfs is under GPL...
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/btrfs-kernel-unstable.git;a
>=blob;f=COPYING;h=ca442d313d86dc67e0a2e5d584b465bd382cbf5c;hb=e0dfd0d76e9205
>a542222f04c07072814c0ab282

That's Joerg's point. GPL is restrictive when compared to other OSS licenses. 
As a filesystem it pretty much goes into a kernel. It's an original work, so 
can only go into other kernels under the GPL. Effectively the only one that 
can work for is Linux.

Joerg isn't a Linux man, he codes for other platforms too. His viewpoint from 
what he's posted in the post is usually something like "can this be used on 
other systems too?"

For btrfs the answer is unfortunately "not really"

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com