[rescue] Oracle kills Solaris

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2017, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

> Very sad situation.  However, Illumos and related, lives on, and ZFS has
> made it out into the wider world, so there's that.

I appreciate ZFS on my FreeBSD systems almost literally every day.  It's
probably saved me months of unavailability, cumulatively.

The code will drive you insane, though.  There's a very thick layer of
glue to make FreeBSD's VFS system look like what ZFS expects, to make
FreeBSD's synchronization primitives look like what ZFS expects, and to
make ZFS's memory allocator not trainwreck into the rest of the kernel.
ZFS on Linux probably has similar glue (although I've not looked at that
code).

Thanks to the patent provisions of the CDDL, that glue will never go away
until the patents expire, Oracle changes the license, or Oracle disclaims
the patents.  CDDL only grants patent protection for the unmodified
portions of code.  So, while there are likely many opportunities for
performance enhancement in ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD, mining those
opportunities is a legal hazard in countries that recognize software
patents.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA