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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

You should read the link, it answers many of your questions here. For example, it's not a reimplementation of ZFS, it's an organization to coordinate between the many different groups that are actively using ZFS in their products.

Parts of btrfs may be inspired by ZFS, but btrfs doesn't even aspire to some of ZFS's niceties like zraid3. And if you're looking at ever using 4TB disks, a third parity bit should be a requirement.

I'm a fan of btrfs, but I'm a much much bigger fan of ZFS. ZFS will almost certainly be at the base of our next storage buildout, and btrfs probably will not. The only thing keeping btrfs relevant is that the GPL and CDDL interact poorly. But when there's a great, well tested, and higher tech code base, why should people abandon it? ZFS is used by many many people in production, btrfs by very few, and even if btrfs hits all its development roadmap it won't be the equal of ZFS.

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I read the link, and I disagree that it answers these questions. It is presented as "the truly open source successor to the ZFS project", which is why I understood it was a fork.

I agree that btrfs is not ready for production (and I'm not ready to hand my precious bytes to it yet), and will probably never be as feature rich as ZFS. But the licensing issue will always exist, and Linux needs a modern file system -- btrfs.

That said, a lot of people/businesses use ZFS on Linux in production, so it's nice that there is an central place where they can find documentation about it.

My apologies, on reading again, my first sentence comes across far snarkier than I meant it to be! I thought that the announcement was clear, but reading again, I can see some ambiguities.

I do agree that that Linux probably could use something better than ext4. But Linux also needs something like ZFS.

If Linux's license makes it too difficult to run ZFS, then I can run FreeBSD, Illumos, OpenIndiana, or whatever other open source OS I want in order to get ZFS. But I can't replace ZFS with btrfs, and it doesn't look like btrfs wants to be able to replace ZFS.

Well, it's like fork but it's the other way. After Oracle bought Sun, other projects that adopted ZFS continued fixing it and adding new features.

So FreeBSD has its version, Illumnos (fork of Solaris) has it own, Delphix own and so on. Those projects were using patches from each other but managing all of that became problematic.

So they basically designated one central place to do ZFS development from which all of the projects will use.

So now instead of many ZFS forks there just two: - Oracle - which is now closed source - Open-ZFS - which will be now the official open source ZFS that all Open Source systems will use.

Unfortunately it will still be CDDL, since no one in that project has power to do it. This would require Oracle and all contributors to allow for changing the license.

And to make things even more interesting/confusing, Oracle is one of the forces behind btrfs.

Yes, this is in no way encouraging, but at least it's GPL and as long as they pay the developer I won't mind. If they stop its development I'm sure Redhat or IBM will pick it up.

That is only partially true. btrfs was founded by Chris Mason before he joined Oracle. They simply let him continue hacking on it. He left Oracle in June of last year and works at Fusion IO. I'm sure Oracle has someone hacking on btrfs, but no one there was seriously pushing it (that I'm aware of) other than Chris Mason.

Do you have any evidence of this? I've tried to corroborate it and from what I can tell Chris Mason himself is quoted as saying he started it shortly after joining Oracle. Additionally Oracle seems to be pretty involved with btrfs and has devoted a lot of resources.

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