Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 01:07:47 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@ns.caldera.de> Cc: Dennis Berger <Dennis.Berger@nipsi.de>, freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG, opengfs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: Porting a new filesystem to FreeBSD Message-ID: <3BA5AF53.EE87658F@mindspring.com> References: <3BA4B507.CC70ECD4@nipsi.de> <20010916140843.A21982@xor.obsecurity.org> <3BA52C79.E1E247F5@mindspring.com> <3BA5419F.BF0C3E70@nipsi.de> <3BA555D8.D2C53387@mindspring.com> <20010917084023.A13990@caldera.de>
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Christoph Hellwig wrote: > Sistina has changed the License for GFS 4.2 to some own, propriterary > one. They chooses to ignore the GPL problematic and thus might get > into legal problems very soon. I don't know what contributions, if any, were made under the terms of the old license. The new license requires that you license it from them for commercial gain, if you ship it in a product, and charge for it. I think that you could use it in BSD without a problem, from a first reading of it. The intellectual property claims may stop some contributors, if they wish to contribute pantented/patentable technology. The license grants for sources, for which there is a royalty free back-grant to the authors, for derivative works makes sense -- it makes more sense than the FSF approach, for which you must assign rights (as with the Sistina license), and for which your rights are only returned to you under the terms of the GPL, rather than as a perpetual royalty free rights to do with your own code as you wish (yes, I know the GPL does not require that, but it _is_ required for FSF controlled projects, if you want your code accepted by them). So from what I can see, the license is annoying from a commercial perspective, but would not stop a CDROM FreeBSD shipment, and would potentially not stop commercial use (they allow commercial internal use for everyone, and they allow commercial use for a fee for services incorporating the code to educational institutions). So you would still need to license for straight commercial use, or for use in a service for a fee, if you were not a non-profit edcucational institution. > We (the OpenGFS project) have spend about ten times as much time > just to fix the horrible implementation bugs in GFS, not to mention# > that it also has a lot of design problems. I'm only worried about the drivers for the weird hardware, and the interoperability issues. Frankly, I can write filesystems in my sleep... I can churn out that kind of code at about 2,200 lines a day -- ask Julian about my 22,000 line "fetchmail" replacement, which I churned out in a period of only two work weeks -- brainless (simple) code can be written at about the speed I can type. > If you want to develop and freestanding filesystem driver (e.g. > not trying to use butter ugly constructs to shared code between > operating systems) feel free to join the OpenGFS project. > (http://www.opengfs.org). Unfortunately, from the web page, it has the GPL issues which will preclude using it as a boot FS, or shipping a CDROM which would install to it as the root FS type, by way of user selection (preferred) or by default (annoying to commercial users). At least I can actually use the code... -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message
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