Oracle (Solaris ZFS Dtrace)

Clive Wagenaar clivewagenaar at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 19:10:47 UTC 2009


Hi Mark

Trust it is OK to email you directly with a bold suggestion?

I am a fellow South African, now resident in Ireland.

Thanks for a great distro, I have been using it since 4.10 or just
thereafter, it has been one hell of a ride, best ever.
Currently running 9.04-RC, have been tracking it since the first Alpha,
it looks very good, again.

Now onto the point of this email:

What are the odds of Oracle Gpl'ing ZFS and Dtrace?

Can you and Linus Torvalds, or someone with sway at Oracle  (or Sun)
nudge them to do the right thing by moving ZFS and Dtrace over to Linux
community via the Gpl license as soon as feasible?
(This may in-fact already be in Oracles planning seeing as they are
paying chris Mason to develop BTRFS?)

We could then also have what is arguably the best file system anywhere,
on any platform in Ubuntu/Linux.
Ubuntu server, with ZFS, I really cant see why this cant then become the
defacto standard for most servers.
Very much like Ubuntu, on the Desktop, has now become over the last few
short years?

I believe Oracle, as a organization uses Linux internally.
What Distro are they using on the desktops internally?
Is it 'Unbreakable' like on the Servers they support too?
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/interview/0,289202,sid39_gci967664,00.html

(Desktop users like me will also get a huge boost, especially if we make
a rollback system something like what nexenta is trying to do in:
exenta-core-platform_2.0-b104-rc1_x86.iso)

Listen Red Hat say there is no money on the desktop, I really don't see
how they can possibly say that, that is just way too short sighted.
But Ubuntu is now also moving into the server market, right as a huge
game changing move is happening, as we speak.

If Oracle want to show that they are dedicated to the Open Source
community, as a whole, incl the Linux community, then handing Solaris/
Open Solaris, incl ZFS and Dtrace over to say, the Linux Foundation?,
would go a long way of showing their commitment to Linux and Open Source
in general. (It can be dual licensed so Solaris does not get affected?)
Ultimately I would imagine that Linux and Solaris will converge into
just Linux at some point.

I wonder if Theodore Ts'o and Chris Mason would help the Ubuntu Kernel
devs to move this into a Ubuntu TESTING KERNEL, we dont have a testing
one that includes all the standard Ubuntu patches yet, but we really do
need a testing kernel ASAP, imho.

It would be great, when it is Gpl'd, if the Ubuntu Kernel team, maybe to
include Theodore Ts'o, could make a testing kernel with ZFS?
Theodore's Wikipedia page says he is going back to IBM at the end of
December 2009. I think this would be a huge missed opportunity for
Ubuntu if we did not convince him to join the Ubuntu community?
Honestly, if I where you, I would consider emailing him to offer him a
job at Canonical to work on Ubuntu's Kernel,Ubuntu's file system
implementations, Ubuntu's server distro, Ubuntu's scalability and so on?

If this ZFS/Dtrace work was done by Ubuntu, there is noway anyone, (Greg
Kroah-Hartman), will ever then be able to say that Ubuntu does nothing
upstream for the Kernel, surely?

Go on, lets get this done before Fedora, that will be a great day for
Ubuntu sysadmins, the geeks in the Ubuntu development program and all
users that care about Linux and open source as a whole.

Hope this email is well received and not out of place


A happy Ubuntu user

-- 

email & gtalk:  clivewagenaar at gmail.com

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