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Comment by emillon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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