They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL, which also wouldn't cost them anything as far as I'm aware, but we're both making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawnmower.
Ignoring how Sun/Oracle's shenanigans with ZFS don't nearly account for "90% of their brand damage"...
> simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL
That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files:
~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "\(Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>\)" | wc -l
821
(The CDDL is a file-based license. At the time of that decision, there were already roughly a hundred CDDL-licensed files in the source tree specified as available under "Version 1.0 only".)
Making a concession when they have not been forced to might indicate weakness to some. In that sense showing a speck of humanity might actually harm their stock.
My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too busy to give it a thought.
And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time.
So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior.
I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other.
Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.
Yeah, but Microsoft also did a two steps forward and three steps back there. Things like shoving product ads onto the lock screen and preinstalling Candy Crush Soda Saga cost them more goodwill than any developer-facing effort earned them.
This one especially hurt only people who are inside Windows ecosystem. For people like me Microsoft is nice author of one product. I'm talking about VS Code.
Increasingly more of VSCode isn't open source. First-party Microsoft language extensions have been locking features up for quite some time now, and whenever that happens the license also prohibits running it on any VSCode fork.
Microsoft’s “core DNA” is still there firmly, though.
They successfully weaponized open source by giving something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e. closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
Also they act like their open source code is “Free”. They firmly control it, yet act like they don’t.
Microsoft’s image didn’t improve a bit in my eyes.
> Also they act like their open source code is “Free”. They firmly control it, yet act like they don’t.
They are responsive to the community and merge community PRs. That's already more "open" than, say, SQLite.
Sure, they don't give away merge rights and keep exclusive control over the upstream copy. But how many "open" projects have a second maintainer at all? I mean, more than one person (the original author) with merge access.
The code is free. You can always fork it and use it however you like. That's always been the deal you get with open source.
Sure, it's nice when the upstream maintainers always do only the things you like, and you never need to fork. But that's a separate quality, unrelated to the code itself being "free" or "open".
> They successfully weaponized open source by giving something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e. closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
And that's why people should be pushing for Free Software, rather than Open Source.
20 years in the game, and I ended up agreeing with steve ballmer: open source is cancer.
Look at how bad it went for ElasticSearch and Redis, and then look how well it's going for Grafana (whose software is Free Software - besides being just great).
This is so true that Redis did not go back to being "open source", it became Free Software (AGPL).
Pylance started as open source and moved to a closed source model. Relevant discussion is at [0].
Then, they closed the .NET ecosystem [1]. This is a bit more complex and convoluted. Closed source debuggers, changing plug-in licenses, removing nice features from open source .NET runtime, etc.
Since Oracle is not in B2C, there is no brand damage in openly being a net-negative rent-seeker. Rent-seeking is what shareholders crave. It makes line go up, it has electrolytes.
It only makes the line go up in the short term. In the long term companies will avoid Oracle, and sales will go down. But shareholders don't care about the longterm.
Oracle has demonstrated the long-term and their stock has never been higher. Their sales are finally heading higher again.. They're one of the oldest software companies and are approaching 50 years old. What is more long-term in their industry than what they have accomplished?
They're better positioned now than they have been at any other point in the past 10-15 years.
Just make sure you don't benchmark it. Comparing to the competition is a serious breach of contract.
Oracle is not an abusive relationship, it's just that you shouldn't be looking elsewhere, and infractions will be punished. They are very serious about audits.
The version of ZFS that everybody (besides the dwindling number of Oracle Solaris customers) uses now, OpenZFS, has been maintained completely independently of Oracle since they shut down OpenSolaris in 2010. This means that Oracle relicensing ZFS wouldn't do anything to help with getting it integrated into the Linux kernel, since there's been hundreds of independent contributors to ZFS since then who all own their own copyrights. Because ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, which has an automatic upgrade clause, Oracle could simply copy/paste the GPLv2 license text and call it "CDDL v2" if they wanted to make ZFS able to be included in Linux.
Swapping to an entirely new license rather than adding one sentence to the existing one is not simpler either in terms of linguistics or getting approval from their army of lawyers.
It would require getting all past contributors _and_ the current copyright owner to agree. Normally I'd agree that getting all past contributors to agree is the hard part, but the copyright owner here is Oracle. I'd have more confidence in getting the rest of the contributors to agree to a license in Pig Latin than getting Oracle to make literally any change to the license for this.
However, it is not legal to then redistribute this combination. Which essentially means linux distros cannot ship with OpenZFS: each user must combine the two on their own.
(This doesn’t necessarily stop people, but it is read by Debian as “illegal enough” to warrant a splash screen on installing OpenZFS that you’re losing the right to redistribute.)
Who would sue, and what damages would they demonstrate in this case? Both the Linux and ZFS source is available and you are allowed and encouraged to build and use them. Redistributing binaries can be thought of caching precompiled artifacts, merely speeding up what you can already do manually (and with reproductible builds the result should be identical). Nobody loses anything.
Let's say I built a magical compiler capable of compiling a Linux+ZFS kernel in miliseconds. I put it behind a web UI which accepts a Linux tarball and ZFS tarball and spits out the compiled kernel. Because of some mysterious bug I am still trying to solve, only specific Linux and ZFS tarballs work, so I put validation to hash the uploaded tarballs and only let through the ones that are known to work.
Let's peel back the curtain: there is no magical compiler and all this is doing is hashing the input kernel & ZFS source tarballs, using it as a lookup table in a cache of precompiled binaries, and spitting out the matching one, which is currently not allowed. But let's assume the compiler was real, in this case it should be fine, even though the functionality of the system is no different.
I would at least understand if one of the licenses explicitly restricted the right to distribute ready-to-use binaries as a way to carve themselves a moat so the authors are the only ones that would be able to do it (and thus charge for it). But that's not the case here, nobody is better (or worse) off whether I waste time building it manually vs reuse someone else's earlier effort of building it.
It would be the Free Software Foundation, for a copyright violation due to GPL licensing violation. (Technically the Linux Kernel Foundation, as they’re the copyright holders here, but the FSF is generally involved in suits to protect GPL.) It is not necessary to demonstrate damages for copyright infringement; there are statutory (assumed) damages for this tort.
WOULD they? It depends on how important it is to have a credible threat of enforcement for GPL violations. But it’s not zero, and it’s a pretty clear violation. Which is enough to scare off most major distros - if they receive a C&D, that’d be a breaking change they’d have to push retroactively. Not worth the risk.
ZFS is widely used with Linux in HPC (https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs). Is asking users to install ZFS separately really that much of a lift for ZFS's target audience?
Being out-of-tree means that kernel refactors break ZFS, and that it has a lot fewer hands and eyeballs available for the kinds of bugs that require internal design changes to fix (rather than paper over).
Their lawyers have said it in public many times so there are a lot of legal doctrines that would make it very hard for them to backtrack at this point.
