Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Future Of BCacheFS In The Kernel Is Uncertain" video.

  1. ​ @darukutsu  the zfs story is simple. the people writing it for linux are doing a from scratch reimplimentation, so from that point of view the oracle licence only matters if those people have seen the original source code. where the issue comes for the kernel is that oracle has a history of suing people for look and feel and for work a likes, so the kernel people will not include it without a statement from oracle that they won't sue. for reiser fs, yhe issue is that it is version 3 in the kernel, it is barely used, and has some fundamental bugs around the 2038 date problem. as most of the developers moved on to other things, and the remaining ones have moved on to version 4 which has not been upstreamed, and version 5 which is a wor, i progress, the bugs in version 3 wi.l not be fixed, leaving the only choice being to remove it. as for kent, and bcachfs, he does not play well with others, so he needs someone else handling upstreaminb the code.
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  2.  @qwesx  sorry, but that is just wrong. the licence gives you the right to modify, distribute, and run the code. what compiling locally does is moves the legal liability from the distribution to individual user, who is usually not worth going after. as regards testing in court, the options are relatively few, and apply the same no matter what the license is. if you claim not to agree to the license, then the code defaults back to proprietary, and you just admitted in court to using proprietary code without a license. if the licences are incompatible, your only choice is to get one side or the other to relicense their code under a compatible license for your usage, which us usually somewhere between unlikely and nearly impossible with most projects, meaning that again you do not have a valid license for the derivative work, and you just admitted to it in court. with zfs, the problem is even worse, as you have oracle who sued google for having a compatible api, which was then resolved to be fair use, but only after costing millions to defend, and taking many years. because of this the linux kernel community will not take code providing any oracle apis without a signed statement from oracle that they will not sue, not because they do not think they will win, but because they cannot afford the problems that will occur if they do sue. individual distributions shipping zfs would face the same potential consequences, which is why most do not ship it. this leaves you back at moving the liability from the kernel, to the distribution, to the end user, where the benefits to suing most of them are just not worth it. as to trying it in court, there are lots of licenses, and lots of people either being too silly to check the licenses properly, or trying clever things to skirt the edges of legality because they think they have found a loophole. there are also lots of places to sue, and as floss is a worldwide effort, you have to consider all of them at once, which is why it is a really bad idea to try and write your own license. in america, people have tried the trick of not accepting the license, and have failed every time. the same is true in germany under a mix of european and german law. this covers the two biggest markets, and can thus be considered settled. what happens in every case, is that the license forms a contract for you to use the otherwise proprietary code under more liberal terms, and when you reject it it reverts back to the proprietary case, where you then have to prove why you are not using the software without a license. trying to be clever has also been tried, and while the law is less settled than for rejecting the license, you need every judge in every venue to agree with your interpretation of the license, which normally does not happen, so you are back at being in breach of the license, and hoping to get a friendly judge who does not look to give punitive damages for trying to be too clever. the insurance risk usually is not worth it. the only other option is to try and comply with the license, but when you have multiple incompatible licenses this is not a valid option.
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