Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems

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

On Tuesday 25 November 2008 11:07:26 Joerg Schilling wrote:
> It ZFS was under GPL, it did not appear on FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
>
> What I expect from a promising new filesystem is that is may be integrated
> in a large variety of Platforms.
>
> Note that I am a supporter of collaboration in OSS and that it is important
> for me to write software in a highly portable way so anybody may use it....
>
> I do not like the camp mentality.

I used to be a totally-GPL fan but I changed my stance a few years back. The 
thing that did it for me was the TCP/IP stack. If this were not BSD licensed, 
it would not have been adopted as widely as it was, and we would not have an 
internet today. So keeping in mind that the GPL was designed to be used to 
create a free-standing body of free code that comprised an entire Unix-like 
system, I now advocate the following:

Low level code that is intended to be used everywhere - on the order of 
filesystems, networking standards, block devices and such - ideally should be 
BSD licensed. Then anyone anywhere can use it. 

GPL in userland is fine, as apps tend to be free-standing and do not conflict 
with other code, hence the "mere-aggregation" clause.

Kernel modules are different and cannot work this way. Expect in very unusual 
circumstances (eg XFS in the linux kernel) they are derivative works and the 
GPL kicks in. Which is fine, most people will contribute their changes back 
upstream anyway just like GPL demands. But GPL is incompatible with other 
licenses which prohibits equal two-way sharing. The easiest possible solution 
as I see it is to just license this low-level utility code as BSD.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com