ZFS, Btrfs and Oracle
Most of you may already be aware of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. If not, here is an article stating just that from Sun’s website. I read the news as soon as it was published on the net along with the reactions of Sun users for Sun products. What will be the future of mySQL or OpenOffice?
It just dawned on me yesterday: What will be the future of ZFS and Btrfs, seeing how Chris Mason, the lead developer to Btrfs works for Oracle? Historically, Btrfs was the Linux community’s solution to ZFS. Sun had intentionally open sourced and released ZFS under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) as a way to prevent it from being integrated into the Linux kernel and allow the Solaris operating system to have a competing lead. Although the license did not stop it from being ported over to the Mac OS X and other BSD based distributions such as FreeBSD (and PC-BSD).
The CDDL conflicts with the General Public License (GPL) version 2. While we saw ports of ZFS on FUSE, this wasn’t something that could allow the kernel to grow and ensure a more dominant future. In order to last in the enterprise class market, the Linux kernel needed a better performing, more feature rich and newer file system. That is when Btrfs stepped on to the stage, which by the release of Linux kernel 2.6.29, it was merged into the kernel tree.
Reading the Btrfs development mailing list, the concern for the future of Btrfs has already been brought up. Chris Mason assures to the team, that Oracle has not changed the plans for Btrfs and that its development and growth will continue. And realistically this would be the way to go. Too much time and money has been invested into Btrfs. To re-license and port a stable version of ZFS into the Linux kernel could take, at a minimum, a couple years. Also, there is this sense of pride within the community. To port ZFS over to Linux could kill that pride, emphasizing that Linux cannot survive on its own and needs to extract its ideas and functionality from elsewhere. I can also see developers and administrators alike, losing respect for Oracle if they were to make such a drastic decision by abandoning all that has been done.
I for one, hope that Oracle stays true to their word. While the ZFS file system is an excellent file system, I know the Linux kernel will be able to compete on its own terms and with its own technologies.
