Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 13:32:14 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dcs@newsguy.com (Daniel C. Sobral) Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, jar@integratus.com (Jack Rusher), tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), sam@errno.com (Sam Leffler), zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu (Zhiui Zhang), freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Design a journalled file system Message-ID: <200102261332.GAA16827@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <3A9A436B.821D0B01@newsguy.com> from "Daniel C. Sobral" at Feb 26, 2001 08:52:11 PM
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> > > I have been wondering about this legal issue lately. What is the law > > > with regards to implementing XFS as a KLM for FreeBSD & shipping the > > > source in contrib? It won't help people who are trying to make > > > commercial products with embedded FreeBSD, but it might be useful for > > > sysadmins. > > > > You won't be able to boot from it, unless you compile your own > > kernel. This was pretty much the Soft Updates status, until > > recently. > > I'm not sure that is true. You can always load a kld from loader(8). Not from an XFS root filesystem, you can't. > Anyway, any serious user of FreeBSD recompiles the kernel to fine tune > it. It is not a significant restriction. It makes initial installation a pain; I guess every serious user of FreeBSD will have more than one machine, and do their builds on one (FFS) and installs on the other(s) (XFS)? This much pain would make it unlikely to be used, except for people needing to mount their Linux or SGI disks, or in very big installations. I see the value of XFS as providing the same FS for various operating systems, and thereby setting a standard. That value is significantly diminished, if FreeBSD has pain that other systems don't. Frankly, there's nothing that a GPL license prevents, in terms of preventing a company from productizing the XFS alone. I could easily port it to FreeBSD, SVR4, Solaris, SunOS, AIX, AmigaDOS, Windows, etc. -- basically, anywhere I've written a file system before. The GPL doesn't prevent sales from happening in these markets, because, unlike Linux and FreeBSD, having or not having the source code is not so much a barrier as needing the tools and skills to build something out of it which will work. In Linux and FreeBSD, almost every user is a code monkey; in a commercial OS, until recently, the source code was unknown and unknowable, and even when it's available for a licensing fee (e.g. Solaris), there really hasn't been a community grown up around it to hack it. I don't understand why SGI doesn't just license the code under a license that restricts its use to a named set of operating systems, and their derivatives. As it is now, the code is protected from the richest supply of unpaid FS hackers that are available, and _not_ protected from being productized commercially, and the results sold in competition with SGI. Kind of ironic: even the LGPL would let it be usable to FreeBSD (ar + ranlib + ability to relink). Note that IBM's release of the OS/2 JFS under the GPL throws it in the same position (replace "AIX" in the second paragraph up from this one with "IRIX"). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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