>>>>> "dm" == David Magda <dma...@ee.ryerson.ca> writes:
dm> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_dismiss/
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050121014650517
says when the MPL was modified to become the CDDL, clauses were
removed which would have required Oracle to disclose any patent
licenses it might have negotiated with NetApp covering CDDL code. The
disclosure would have to be added to hg, freeze or no: ``If
Contributor obtains such knowledge after the Modification is made
available as described in Section 3.2, Contributor shall promptly
modify the LEGAL file in all copies Contributor makes available
thereafter and shall take other steps (such as notifying appropriate
mailing lists or newsgroups) reasonably calculated to inform those who
received the Covered Code that new knowledge has been obtained.''
This is in MPL but removed from CDDL.
The groklaw poster's concern is that this is a mechanism through which
Oracle could manoever to make the CDDL worthless as a guarantee of zfs
users' software freedom. CDDL does implicitly grant rights to
Oracle's patents, but not to negotiations for shield from NetApp's.
AIUI GPLv3 is different and does not have this problem, though I don't
understand it well so I could be wrong. With MPL at least we would
know about the negotiations: the settlement was ``secret'' which is
exactly the disaster scenario the groklaw poster warned of.
I'm sorry you cannot be uninterested in licenses and ``just want to
get work done.''
To me it looks like the patent situation is mostly an obstacle to
getting ZFS development funded. If you used ZFS secretly in some kind
of cloud service, and never told anyone about it, you could be pretty
certain of getting away with it without any patent claims throughout
the entire decade or so that ZFS remains relevant, but if you want to
participate in a horizontally-divided market like Coraid, or otherwise
share source changes, you might get sued. This regime has to be a
huge drag on the industry, and it makes things really unpredictable
which has to discourage investment, and it strongly favours large
companies.
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