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logrusx
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 Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2024 4:37 pm Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: | | it also seems like a relatively easy solution. |
Easy with easy solutions. Easy/simple solutions are very enticing but never easy or simple. Yes, the bigger hassle is the license dilution as well as the legal consequences over potentially every Linux user. And it doesn't even need for the user to be directly involved in the legal actions. It can just as as easily fall on him out of the blue.
p.s. thanks for the links. I wasn't aware of Linus and other developers opinions, they seem to match mine with a little more details and a bit better reasoning.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
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Zucca
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| Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2024 6:20 pm Post subject: |
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I've never considered zfs because of the hassle with out-of-tree modules.
However the stability of zfs and features would probably bring me to, at least, test it. I've read countless times xfs eats your RAM the same way Chrome does.
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sitquietly
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| Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2024 10:01 pm Post subject: |
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I suspect that some casual readers will be confused by this thread and shrug off ZFS as some kind of poorly supported problem. That would be far from the truth. There are no massive problems here.
ZFS works great on Gentoo. One reason I run Gentoo is that it does properly support ZFS. In many years of running Gentoo with my data on a zfs pool I've never had a problem with ZFS and get to use the most advanced and safest file system for keeping my large dataset (8 TB mirrored).
I find that ZFS provides great protection from a dying hard drive, as well as detection and recovery from disk errors and bitrot, and it provides an easy mechanism to replace a dead drive and keep going without interruption. I love that. AND, it is fast! Very performant!
Anyone who is using ZFS for data reliability is probably also choosing to run the stable gentoo-sources kernel. If you need ZFS then presumably you need a stable system on a non-zfs boot disk and a multi-disk zfs pool for your data. |
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 5:57 am Post subject: |
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| sitquietly wrote: | | I suspect that some casual readers will be confused by this thread and shrug off ZFS as some kind of poorly supported problem. |
ZFS is definitely not for the casual reader. At least not until one can find proper documentation that can help them take off with zfs.
| sitquietly wrote: | | Anyone who is using ZFS for data reliability is probably also choosing to run the stable gentoo-sources kernel. |
Exactly. And here we are, a bunch of people complaining on unstable kernels being removed from tree, calling the current stable kernel ancient. I can't take that seriously.
However I just checked their git log and there it is, they are working on support for 6.11. Go figure. I wouldn't choose that mess once in a million years.
Digging further I found reports it worked on 6.10. You just need to use the latest sources. Perhaps it'll work with the live ebuild.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 7:09 am Post subject: |
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| logrusx wrote: |
Oracle can change everything. Immediately. Only Oracle can do it. |
Perhaps, rather than simply asserting this repeatedly, you could explain how that could be done, given the legal situation as it currently stands?
The problem is that I'm not enough of a lawyer to know whether any argument you might make is valid. I suspect that few people are.
And even if you had a convincing argument, I'm not sure this licensing issue is really the heart of the matter. You (and others) are criticizing Oracle for not making ZFS fit the Linux kernel's licensing scheme. But I don't see anybody criticising Oracle for not making their database engine open source. Oracle isn't an open-source corporation, and doesn't have business practices that can capitalize on open source.
Even if Oracle could change the licensing situation with ZFS -- and it would take a lot to convince me of that -- why should Oracle attract criticism for not doing so? As a minimum, they'd have to employ a bunch of lawyers to figure out all the complexities. How would they explain that expense to their shareholders? Oracle won't make any money from it, whatever happens.
It's fashionable in the Linux world to hate on Oracle, but that's like the shore hating on the ocean for being wet. Oracle is what it is -- it's not fair to beat on Oracle for not being Linux.
BR, Lars. |
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 8:50 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | logrusx wrote: |
Oracle can change everything. Immediately. Only Oracle can do it. |
Perhaps, rather than simply asserting this repeatedly, you could explain how that could be done, given the legal situation as it currently stands?
The problem is that I'm not enough of a lawyer to know whether any argument you might make is valid. I suspect that few people are. |
A license is the legal basis which determines what you can do with an object of copyrights. It may be a publicly available license terms (like GPL, BSD, CC) or terms devised for a specific, even unique case.
When somebody creates something and releases or sells it under certain license they still hold the copyrights, so they may change the licensing in the future. Depending on the terms of the currently held licenses, their owner may or may not be impacted. In the case Oracle is the copyrights holder and only they can change the license to a compatible one or they can give permission for the code to be included in the Linux kernel guaranteeing no legal consequences for the kernel maintainers but also its users.
Better read the links pjp so generously found and compiled in his previous post. They contain more layman description of the problem.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Even if Oracle could change the licensing situation with ZFS -- and it would take a lot to convince me of that -- why should Oracle attract criticism for not doing so? As a minimum, they'd have to employ a bunch of lawyers to figure out all the complexities. How would they explain that expense to their shareholders? Oracle won't make any money from it, whatever happens. |
How would you justify putting that burden onto Linux users without them even suspecting it just because a bunch of enthusiasts want it merged into the kernel for their own convenience? Reality is if Oracle does nothing, nothing happens. I won't justify anything, if they want, they will, if they don't want they will not and that's how things are. No justification can produce results, it only explains the current situation. Like it or not. Action is needed, justified or not, and that action is Oracle changing the license or giving explicit permission which will tie their hands of causing legal trouble.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 10:00 am Post subject: |
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| logrusx wrote: | In the case Oracle is the copyrights holder and only they can change the license to a compatible one or they can give permission for the code to be included in the Linux kernel guaranteeing no legal consequences for the kernel maintainers but also its users.
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The legal situation is way, way more complicated than you think. FWIW I do, in fact, have a law background, although I haven't practised for a long time. But I retain just enough grasp of intellectual property law to realize how difficult it is to fiddle about with license terms after the fact. Open-source licenses are painful to adjudicate at the best of times, even when nobody is trying to change things. This is an area of law which is still in its infancy. Which, in lawyer-speak, means "add another couple of zeros to the invoice".
And even if I'm wrong about that, you still haven't told me why Oracle should attract criticism for not doing something which they have absolutely nothing to gain by doing.
BR, Lars. |
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 10:10 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | And even if I'm wrong about that, you still haven't told me why Oracle should attract criticism for not doing something which they have absolutely nothing to gain by doing. |
I told you already, I don't criticize Oracle. I just explained why ZFS won't get merged into the kernel. And honestly, you don't sound like someone with law background.
There is a legal problem which prevents ZFS from being merged into the kernel. Period. You refuse to at least try to acknowledge that fact. I'm done discussing it.
Good luck. |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 10:12 am Post subject: |
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| logrusx wrote: | [I'm done discussing it.
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Flouncing off doesn't strengthen your argument. Whether I'm actually insane, I guess others can judge.
BR, Lars.
PS. You can spot the qualified lawyers because they are the people who won't offer a legal opinion on a web forum. Everybody else seems to be willing to do this. The most important thing you learn in law school is how complicated everything is, and how hard it is to express general principles.
Last edited by lars_the_bear on Wed Aug 14, 2024 10:26 am; edited 1 time in total |
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 10:23 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | logrusx wrote: | [I'm done discussing it.
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Flouncing off doesn't strengthen your argument.
BR, Lars. |
You've been presented enough arguments which you openly admitted you cannot asses. It's pointless to argue with you.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
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GDH-gentoo
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Perhaps, rather than simply asserting this repeatedly, you could explain how that could be done, given the legal situation as it currently stands? |
I guess the whole debate between you two reduces to one simple question: Is Oracle, or was Oracle at some point, the copyright holder of ZFS's code, yes or no? If it was in a position to start a lawsuit, as Linus seems to assume, then I guess the answer leans towards "yes"?
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | I'm not sure this licensing issue is really the heart of the matter. You (and others) are criticizing Oracle for not making ZFS fit the Linux kernel's licensing scheme. |
As far as I can see, you answered yourself:
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | But I retain just enough grasp of intellectual property law to realize how difficult it is to fiddle about with license terms after the fact. |
Yet you seem to be arguing for a change of the kernel's license so that ZFS's code could be merged? Or what did you mean by "poisoning the well"?
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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| logrusx wrote: | | Easy with easy solutions. Easy/simple solutions are very enticing but never easy or simple. Yes, the bigger hassle is the license dilution as well as the legal consequences over potentially every Linux user. |
I used the word seems intentionally. The problem is less big than you make it out to me. Oracle isn't going to sue you, me, or any other individual. They might sue the Linux organization, and they might sue other companies that included it. Particularly IBM / RH. Note that at least Canonical has been including ZFS and I've not yet heard that they've been sued. So that gives a measure of the likelihood that Oracle is chomping at the bit to sue anyone that dares ship Linux with ZFS.
| logrusx wrote: | | p.s. thanks for the links. I wasn't aware of Linus and other developers opinions, they seem to match mine with a little more details and a bit better reasoning. |
Politics is the only known perpetual motion machine.
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 4:07 pm Post subject: |
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| sitquietly wrote: | | If you need ZFS then presumably you need a stable system on a non-zfs boot disk and a multi-disk zfs pool for your data. |
Well, a primary benefit of ZFS is managing boot environments for upgrades. So without that, it seems unstable to me. What makes that not stable on Gentoo / Linux?
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mrbassie
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 4:40 pm Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: | | Oracle isn't going to sue you, me, or any other individual. |
Is this just your belief or you can reason it somehow? Do you remember the SCO saga? Don't forget in countries like US the legal fees are prohibitively high and even if you win they are at your own expense. It may not be likely Oracle sues anybody but the risk is there and it should be taken into account.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 4:49 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | logrusx wrote: |
Oracle can change everything. Immediately. Only Oracle can do it. |
Perhaps, rather than simply asserting this repeatedly, you could explain how that could be done, given the legal situation as it currently stands? |
There are two (big picture) possibilities. First, Oracle owns all of the intellectual property contained in ZFS. If so, they can simply change the license to GPL2 (the Linux license, no + or other problematic revisions). Second, Oracle doesn't own all of the intellectual property contained in ZFS and therefore cannot change the license without agreement from other rights owners. A third would be that they have no idea if there are other rights owners. Oracle uses it, so they're obviously willing to take on that risk for themselves, and that means they probably don't fear the lawsuit.
Some years ago there was a BSD / ZFS (I think?) conference where an Oracle employee commented that the license might be changed. As far as I know, it hasn't. But that suggested there was at least some effort to make it change. Maybe that was only a few employees who had misplaced optimism.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | The problem is that I'm not enough of a lawyer to know whether any argument you might make is valid. I suspect that few people are. |
I'm not a lawyer either, but it's business and business law happens every day. If Oracle wanted to, there's probably little from stopping them from doing it. Oracle / Larry has demonstrated they don't really care about the non-business Linux community. It would also be relatively easy to say, "Sorry, we tried and it can't be done." So it isn't even worth that much of their time.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | And even if you had a convincing argument, I'm not sure this licensing issue is really the heart of the matter. |
That's up to Linus. If the license changed, is his (justified) dislike of Oracle / Larry too great to ignore? Is Linus' ego to big to allow it into the kernel? I have no idea.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | You (and others) are criticizing Oracle for not making ZFS fit the Linux kernel's licensing scheme. But I don't see anybody criticising Oracle for not making their database engine open source. Oracle isn't an open-source corporation, and doesn't have business practices that can capitalize on open source. |
The two aren't at all comparable. The code for the core parts of the file system would necessarily be part of Linux. That's the license issue. I've never heard that any OracleDB code needs to be in Linux for it to work. This isn't an issue of randomly wanting companies to use GPL compatible licenses (in this case GPL2 since that's the Linux license).
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Even if Oracle could change the licensing situation with ZFS -- and it would take a lot to convince me of that |
I'm not sure why that's complicated or difficult.
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | why should Oracle attract criticism for not doing so? As a minimum, they'd have to employ a bunch of lawyers to figure out all the complexities. How would they explain that expense to their shareholders? Oracle won't make any money from it, whatever happens. |
You seem unaware of Oracle's history. Oracle is first a litigious company and a software company second. That history combined with their interaction with the Linux community has earned them a poor reputation. Sun released it as open source (albeit incompatible with Linux) and Oracle changed that arrangement. That's certainly their right to do so. But their reputation is why they receive criticism. As for the cost / shareholders, it's not that direct a problem. If Oracle wanted to, it wouldn't be an issue. Other companies spend money on supporting open source and don't have shareholder riots. That's not the excuse you think it is.
I can't fin it now, but I gave a boss an article about a law firm recommending their clients NOT sign any contracts with Oracle due to the legal problems. That boss wasn't responsible for the contract, but by the time I left, the organization "couldn't afford to cancel the contract."
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | It's fashionable in the Linux world to hate on Oracle, but that's like the shore hating on the ocean for being wet. Oracle is what it is -- it's not fair to beat on Oracle for not being Linux. |
I can only guess that you have little knowledge about the companies infamous contracts and reputation. As well, I can't imagine that you have much experience with it's software. I'd rather invite a vampire into my home than have my business sign an Oracle contract. Dealing with their software is like helping captor to fix the broken equipment used to torture you. No, that comparison is not as hyperbolic as you think.
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 5:00 pm Post subject: |
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| logrusx wrote: | | pjp wrote: | | Oracle isn't going to sue you, me, or any other individual. |
Is this just your belief or you can reason it somehow? Do you remember the SCO saga? Don't forget in countries like US the legal fees are prohibitively high and even if you win they are at your own expense. It may not be likely Oracle sues anybody but the risk is there and it should be taken into account.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
Do you see the difference between "you, me, or any other individual" and the SCO lawsuit? Individuals are rarely worth suing because there's little to gain from it. Sure, if I was selling free OracleDB licenses, I'd get sued. How many individuals did SCO sue? I only recall the companies, primarily Novell (IIRC) and later IBM. I could see Oracle suing RH / IBM. But why haven't they sued Canonical? They could be hoping other companies with more money ship ZFS.
I absolutely agree with Linus on not including ZFS due to the license and Oracle's reputation. I have zero concern about myself including ZFS and providing it to other users. They haven't sued Canonical, so I'm in no danger. In the off chance I get a cease and desist from Oracle legal, I'd cease and desist. This isn't complicated. On the other hand, if they had a track record of going after individuals, that argument would have merit. But they don't, so it doesn't.
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 5:12 pm Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: | | logrusx wrote: | | pjp wrote: | | Oracle isn't going to sue you, me, or any other individual. |
Is this just your belief or you can reason it somehow? Do you remember the SCO saga? Don't forget in countries like US the legal fees are prohibitively high and even if you win they are at your own expense. It may not be likely Oracle sues anybody but the risk is there and it should be taken into account.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
Do you see the difference between "you, me, or any other individual" and the SCO lawsuit? Individuals are rarely worth suing because there's little to gain from it. |
I see the difference. Do you think me, you or any other individual does not use services provided by someone who provides them using Linux? The safety of me, you or anybody else is equally important as the safety of any legal entity.
SCO were trying to take money from users of the Linux kernel and some smaller entities actually payed. If they won for example against Google, you bet that would have been reflected in the price of mobile phones for example. Things are not that simple, safety in numbers is not that safe.
p.s. Microsoft gets money for every Android phone sold, did you know that? How do you think that happened?
Best Regards,
Georgi
Last edited by logrusx on Wed Aug 14, 2024 6:47 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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GDH-gentoo
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 5:19 pm Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: | | On the other hand, if they had a track record of going after individuals, that argument would have merit. But they don't, so it doesn't. |
They don't, and never will?
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 6:53 pm Post subject: |
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| GDH-gentoo wrote: | | pjp wrote: | | On the other hand, if they had a track record of going after individuals, that argument would have merit. But they don't, so it doesn't. |
They don't, and never will? |
In general, no, they won't. Other comments I made in the same post clarify why. In short, the circumstances have to warrant the effort and cost.
| logrusx wrote: | | I see the difference. Do you think me, you or any other individual does not use services provided by someone who provides them using Linux? |
I think you mean providing ZFS? I only know of Canonical, but sure, there could be others. I want to say I heard of a service that supported zfs-send / zfs-receive for backups, but I think it was BSD. And now that I think of that, ZFS on BSD confirms that the issue is the Linux / CDDL incompatibility. To me this makes it seem like dilution of the GPL2 / Linux kernel is the entire argument. And as Not A Lawyer, this seems like Oracle couldn't get money from or stop BSD from using it. So why then would the same code-base put any company at risk for loss of monetary damages? I don't know, but it doesn't seem like it could. The concern there would seem to be that Oracle could force Linux to remove ZFS code from the kernel, which would be a labor problem and a hassle for anyone then having to migrate to (or back to) ZFS-on-Linux.
| logrusx wrote: | | The safety of me, you or anybody else is equally important as the safety of any legal entity. |
And yet, we know of at least one that dismissed that as not a concern as advised by their lawyers. That's not so say others can't be more cautious. I wouldn't recommend Canonical to anyone, but ZFS has nothing to do with that :)
| logrusx wrote: | | SCO were trying to take money from users of the Linux kernel and some smaller entities actually payed. If they won for example against Google, you bet that would have been reflected in the price of mobile phones for example. Things are not that simple, safety in numbers is not that safe. |
And yet I lost zero sleep and never had any concern over that issue.
If they won against a large company, then their case would have had merit. Last I heard, they did not win.
After the 9/11 WTC attack, some people panicked over what was coming next. During covid, a lot of people panicked about what was going to happen. Some people have a fear of flying, but don't think twice about getting into an automobile. And like using a Linux kernel shipped with ZFS, none of those things concern me. Is there are risk. Yes. Is it one worth worrying about? Only if you're a "big enough" entity or Linux (the organization).
Interesting about the SCO case is that it was a Unix copyright / SCO<->IBM contract issue.
I didn't catch any reference to suing individuals, only that they were infringing copyright. | Quote: | | In cases, SCO publicly implied that a number of other parties have committed copyright infringement, including not only Linux developers, but also Linux users. |
| Quote: | | Lacking grounds to sue all users generally, SCO dropped this aspect of its cases. |
| Quote: | | SCO has demanded that Linux users obtain licenses from SCOsource to be properly licensed to use the code in question. |
| Quote: | | these alleged violations by IBM would not have involved Linux distributors or end users. SCO's trade secret claims were dropped |
| Quote: | | SCO claimed to offer corporate users of Linux a license ... found it impossible to buy such a license |
| Quote: | | [SCO executives refused] to believe that it was possible for Linux and much of the GNU software to have come into existence without *someone* *somewhere* having copied pieces of proprietary UNIX source code to which SCO owned the copyright. The hope was that we would find a "smoking gun" |
| Quote: | | ...we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever. |
Other than amusement, the point of those quotes was to show that you can also panic about cases that have no merit.
Oh, I almost forgot the source:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 7:13 pm Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: |
| logrusx wrote: | | I see the difference. Do you think me, you or any other individual does not use services provided by someone who provides them using Linux? |
I think you mean providing ZFS? |
No, I don't mean that. Things go way beyond ZFS. The rest of your post is literally "It won't happen to me, I don't care". Excuse me for not wanting to put the effort to address that. Also it has gone way beyond the original topic and there's no point in furthering it.
Best Regards,
Georgi |
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 7:28 pm Post subject: |
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Fair enough, but that wasn't my point. It's not going to happen to you either, or most any other individual without exceptional circumstances.
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saellaven
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 8:09 pm Post subject: |
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Linux is licensed as GPL 2 specifically, not even GPL 2 or later. Given it has tens of thousands of contributors, changing the licensing is impossible. Some people are dead and it would be a logistical nightmare trying to track down everyone, including heirs, to sign off. All it takes is one contributor not agreeing and the kernel cannot be re-licensed without rewriting all of that author's contributions (now imaging if 100 people refuse to sign off, including some major subsystem contributors).
The CDDL was intentionally written to NOT be GPL compatible. As far as I know, Oracle owns the copyright over the entire thing and CAN unilaterally re-license it.
Blame Linus all you want, this was intentional on the part of Sun and Oracle could fix it overnight.
I intentionally try to minimize the number of out-of-tree modules I use. Even just using nvidia-drivers and virtualbox can give me headaches at times. I don't want to have to worry about modules not being up to date and/or being tied to old kernels.
Gentoo stable and upstream stable are different things. I have my own local overlay of stuff when Gentoo isn't up to my liking and while I use ~vanilla-sources, I'm more than happy to either throw something in my overlay or to just download a tarball from kernel.org if I wanted to use something not directly in the main repository. It's just one of the prices you pay to use something more niche (I'm still using a GTK1.0 app and maintain it and its dependencies in my overlay. I don't expect anyone else to do it for me.).
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sitquietly
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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[delete}
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sitquietly
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| Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 9:44 pm Post subject: |
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| pjp wrote: | | sitquietly wrote: | | If you need ZFS then presumably you need a stable system on a non-zfs boot disk and a multi-disk zfs pool for your data. |
Well, a primary benefit of ZFS is managing boot environments for upgrades. So without that, it seems unstable to me. What makes that not stable on Gentoo / Linux? |
You are exactly right on that ..... using zfs for the boot disk on a linux machine is not a good idea. Boot environments are a Solaris / FreeBSD concept where the base operating system supports it fully. I've never thought of "boot environments" as being a primary benefit of zfs. Even on FreeBSD I don't bother with them -- never had to boot into one when I did create them. The benefit of zfs is never losing data (which requires a multi-disk pool).
I have had both HDD and SSD disks die on me, more than once, and zfs saved my data with very little fuss.
Single-disk zfs is pointless (use btrfs for that -- you get very nice bootable snapshots). There is no protection from corruption on a single-disk since there is no redundancy. So any error can be detected, but cannot be corrected. When the corruption is detected the disk will not mount. With multi-disk pools you just get a status message of "this pool is degraded -- please replace disk n". There's no "degraded" mode for a single-disk.
On FreeBSD it's trivial to install and boot the system from a multi-disk array -- that is sweet. The system flies! |
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Kernel & Hardware
