Hacker News Reader

Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

Zstd doesn't use a login, it doesn't track you across the internet, it doesn't make shadow profiles on you, and it doesn't have ads or telemetry. Zstd is even part of the Linux kernel at this point[0], so it's safe to say that it isn't a Facebook product anymore. They can't pull the rug on zstd, since it's BSD/GPL licensed. Unless I'm missing something, nobody is feeding the beast by using zstd.

There's lots of similar cool technologies made by other "evil" companies. I don't use ZFS, but its origins in Sun/Oracle isn't the reason I don't.

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20181109190304.8573-1-kilobyte@...

View on HN

I don't use ZFS, and the Oracle origins is the reason why. I'm very worried that the best filesystem available is forever stuck with a hostile license, and that so many of the good filesystem engineers are contributing to Oracle's product rather than to a non-Oracle alternative. (EDIT: I know zstd is under a good license, so its situation isn't the same a ZFS's, I just commented on ZFS since you brought it up.)

Anyways, I prefer to not use Facebook products.

> that so many of the good filesystem engineers are contributing to Oracle's product rather than to a non-Oracle alternative.

OpenZFS isn't Oracle's product; it certainly includes a great deal of Sun/Oracle code, but Oracle themselves can't use the OpenZFS commits without honoring the CDDL license, which to my knowledge they've not done.

Fair, but all the Oracle code in OpenZFS precludes OpenZFS from ever re-licensing under a less hostile license.

ZFS was made by Sun Microsystems, which was a dear, awesome company that educated, fed, clothed and put bread on the table for an entire generation of computer professionals outside of Sun Microsystems, not to mention paid millions out of their own coffers to open source a reference implementation of a System V Release 4.0 UNIX. And to top it all off, Sun Microsystems made awesome hardware.

  Sun kicked butt
  had fun
  didn't cheat
  loved their customers
  changed computing forever.

I hear people say that, yet Sun Microsystems is the company which created the CDDL to be intentionally GPL-incompatible[1] and then made a filesystem which they licensed under the CDDL. Then they sold themselves to one of the worst tech companies. Not exactly the behaviour I would expect for an awesome company.

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/CDDL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com