[FoRK] xfs corruption

[Luis Villa]

On Dec 15, 2007 3:02 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 02:55:57PM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
>
> > Yeah, give kudos to Sun for very savvy open-but-fuck-the-other-guys licensing.
>
> Yes, I noticed. (Tracking Sun both because of work and because they've become
> somewhat open-source-friendly lately, about as much as Cupertino, I guess).
>
> Not too bad for a proprietary company, actually. Too bad it took
> them being on the brink on death to start seeing things our way.

Yeah. On the plus side, both companies are doing a lot more than I
ever would have thought ten years ago (or even five).

But on the negative side, if you watch Sun carefully you'll see there
are a lot of choices that can't be meaningfully explained in any way
other than as a 'we'll be open, but god forbid that actually enable
our competitors'. OpenSolaris licensing (which is what is screwing you
with regards to ZFS) is one of those choices. (a GPL v3 solaris,
ironically, would not help the situation at all, which is why Sun is
considering v3.) And of course there is still strict copyright
assignment- so they can take proprietary any derivatives they want to
at any point.

This is of course fully their prerogative, but it is a shame that
their customers aren't getting the full benefit of open source because
Sun isn't willing to share value with existing communities.

Luis