Who deploys production systems on a large scale with a "private" build of the filesystem code? I want my production systems to run on code that is being used by as many people as possible; I don't want patched kernels, I don't want privately built kernel packages, I don't want a unique system that only I've ever seen. I want a system that is as boring as possible (while still providing the functionality I need to effectively do my job). I want a system with a bunch of people complaining about it and asking questions about it online, so that when problems arise, I can find answers.

Now that ZFS is available on Ubuntu and seems to have some adoption, I guess it's a reasonable choice for some. I'm still a bit iffy on it. I don't really want to add license concerns to my list of worries.

The CDDL also has patent clauses and so it's conceivable that a user of OpenZFS which received it in a way that violates the OpenZFS license could be liable for patent infringement of an Oracle patent. And there have been many cases of companies suing users of software over patents.

Another issue is that you should always get software like your filesystem from your distribution. We do a lot of work making sure that your systems can be safely updated, and making sure that upstream bugs are fixed for our distribution. Even community distributions put a lot of effort into that work. As someone who works on maintaining a distribution (I work for SUSE and contribute to openSUSE), I would guess that most people underestimate how much work you need to devote to maintaining the software in a distribution.

>The CDDL also has patent clauses and so it's conceivable that a user of OpenZFS which received it in a way that violates the OpenZFS license could be liable for patent infringement of an Oracle patent. And there have been many cases of companies suing users of software over patents.

Again, with usage this isn't a problem, the license could only possibly be broken by distribution with the GPL. Even then, I believe it is the GPL that is broken, so the patent clause would remain.

As for the rest of your argument, the OpenZFS team does a lot of work maintaining the filesystem. Why does that work need to come from you?

> As for the rest of your argument, the OpenZFS team does a lot of work maintaining the filesystem. Why does that work need to come from you?

Integration into our tools, backporting fixes, doing release engineering, tracking upstream changes, triaging and resolving distribution bug reports, documenting usage and troubleshooting, configuring defaults and best practices, a whole lot of testing, etc.

As I said, there's a lot of work that goes into a distribution (I probably haven't covered most of it) that most people don't think about. And that's assuming that a distribution is going to be passive about something as core as a filesystem -- which we wouldn't be. So we'd be working with upstream on development as well, which is more work. So saying something like "it's supported on distribution X" when that distribution doesn't even provide official packages for it is a massive stretch. It might work on distribution X, and you might provide independent ISV-style support for it, but it's not supported by us.

I appreciate that the sort of work distributions do isn't well-publicised (mostly because stability is hardly a sexy thing to blog about, and we don't rewrite things in JavaScript every weekend). But there is an incredible amount of work that goes into making distributions work well for users, and there's a reason that many distributions have lasted for so many years (there's a need for someone to do the boring work of packaging for you).

Yeah btrfs works best on the OS partitions. I would hate to roll in an unsupported filesystem for my OS.

If I know that Canonical can't legally distribute ZFS in whatever format to me, and yet I use Canonical's distribution of ZFS, isn't there a legal risk there? After all, it would turn out that I have no license to use said distribution of ZFS as such a license was never conferred to me by someone with the legal right to do so.

Generally speaking, courts would probably give me the benefit of the doubt if I had no reason to believe that they couldn't distribute it to me - but as I knew they couldn't (the issues with ZFS and the Linux kernel are well-documented), and I knew I'm using it, they'd probably hold me in violation of copyright.

>If I know that Canonical can't legally distribute ZFS in whatever format to me, and yet I use Canonical's distribution of ZFS, isn't there a legal risk there?

If you somehow knew that any form of distribution was illegal that would be the case. I haven't heard anyone saying that's the case, distributing it bundled with GPL software is potentially breaks the GPL.