Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Is It Time To Leave BCacheFS In The Past" video.

@darukutsu what happened is that it is owned by Oracle, who like to sue, and do not like to change course. So you can't get them to put it under a compatible license, and even a complete rewrite from scratch is not safe from litigation, as seen by the drama over the Android usage of a subset of the java apis and register based jvm which is needed for mobile and Oracle still don't have. These were all written from scratch, and they still sued, so linus and the kernel lawyers basically say it is an out of tree fs until Oracle makes a move as they cannot take the risk.
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@guiorgy yes they could do it tomorrow, but the point is that they have not done so. Also, remember that a lot of these companies are now run by accountants, who upon seeing the money signs from the lawyers, do not bother looking at the costs if it goes wrong. Mostly it is not about making a balanced judgement call, if it was the sgi vs the world case would not have gone ahead, and neither would the Oracle vs Google case.
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@Silver-eb7zm yes, canonical consulted their lawyers and decided it was a risk worth taking. This was based upon the benefits they could receive from shipping it, the low likelyhood of being sued, and the odds of being able to settle or fund fighting it. This does not make it license compatible, which a lot of other top lawyers say it is not. Canonical is largely a newbie distro, which is not where the money is. Both the linux foundation and redhat are well funded, so the return from sueing and winning is high, so the risk for them shipping it is also high, which is why they don't.
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