On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Ignatich wrote:
Bart Smaalders writes:
Abide by the terms of the CDDL and all is well. Basically, all you
have to do is make your changes to CDDL'd files available. What you
do w/ the code you built (load it into MVS, ship a storage appliance,
build a ZFS for Linux) is up to you.
The problem is not with CDDL, GPL is the problem. ATI and nVidia do provide
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
To sum all of this I see a number of possible solutions for this situation:
[ ... ]
N. Fix the GPL, to enable codesharing with opensource code of other licenses.
(you said above you recognized the problem - so why not fix the problem ?)
[ ... ]
4. GPL ZFS reimplementation project is started. I prefer that way until 1),
2) or 3) happen.
Reminds me of "Project Harmony". One should try it. Qt got dual-licensed
in the end. Whether that was due to Harmony "success" or just a business
decision by Trolltech, who knows, but then there's precedence that seems
to indicate such an approach may trigger the owner to license as GPL what
used to be non-GPL code.
I know Sun opened most if not all ZFS related patents for OpenSolaris
community. So I repeat questions I asked in my first mail:
1. Are those patents limited to CDDL/OpenSolaris code or can by used in
GPL/Linux too?
2. If GPL code can't use those patented algorithms, will you please provide
list of ZFS-related patents? RAID-Z and LZJB are most obvious technologies
which may be patent protected.
These days, the situation with patents in computing is so bad that as a
software writer, you essentially have no choice but "wait and see". To
have even a fairly trivial software project proactively checked against
potential patent violations would add prohibitive legal costs that no
independent software writer could shell out.
And just because a piece of software is under GPL doesn't mean it cannot
violate a patent, and/or that you'd be free to re-use that patented
technology, embodied in this sourcecode, in a completely different
project. Licensing the patent and licensing the code are two different
things, and not all opensource licenses "cover your *ss" wrt. to patents.
(but this is really getting off-topic now)
FrankH.
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