It's a fair critique though I didn't write this because I thought I was breaking news. The Canonical announcement was honestly exciting for me, in particular because they evaluated the licensing issues and decided that they were within their rights to provide ZFS to their users. It seemed though that the voices of practitioners was being drowned out by those focusing exclusively on legal matters. I was hoping to provide some information for those unacquainted with both the technology and the legal miasma. Regardless, I'm excited that ZFS is about to have many more users.
"Nominal statutory damages, divided among the thousands of copyright holders entitled to equal shares, scarcely lift the matter above the level of damnum absque injuria."
Lots of people do exactly that. In fact, many companies even use software for which the licenses have lapsed or they never owned licenses in the first place. Sometimes it's by accident; in other cases it's a knowing acceptance of risk.
"As with anything, evaluate the technology, evaluate the risks, and move on."
I've been selling to enterprise customers for a little while now. All technology has risk, new technology and the status quo alike. Companies weigh those risks against the expected benefits. Some folks will obviously avoid the brouhaha completely; it makes sense. Others will decide that the benefits outweigh the risk; there's nothing less comprehensible about that decision.
"In the end, perhaps what matters is that Ubuntu users should be able to use ZFS without fear of consequences. However, morally they should be aware that ZFS in Ubuntu is a violation in the opinion of many the experts."
I don't trust the author on matters of jurisprudence or technology; I certainly don't on matters of morality.
Take ZFS. I designed the flash integration for ZFS; it's used as a caching tier. ZFS is definitely not optimized for use with flash as its primary backing store. The same is true for some of the other filesystems in the list; offhand: CASL and WAFL.
Most of the rest are designed for embedded use cases, are research toys, or are embedded research toys.
Agreed that Apple is very well-positioned for this -- the question is whether they care about the problem. A purpose-built filesystem would improve performance and longevity at a lower cost. Is it worth it for Apple to invest in a brand new file system and data path?
Brian, your premise is interesting, but the post was spare on details. What were the remarkable aspects of your culture? Did you back into it or did you do something deliberate to inculcate that those aspects of the culture?
When a company the size of Oracle announces something at their premiere conference, it's reliably not something they thought of for the first time that morning. If Ed Screven was a developer, hacking up DTrace for OEL, and writing on his blog and not the Chief Corporate Architect, reporting to Oracle's CEO, Larry Ellison, speaking at a keynote then I would totally agree with you.
Apple's WWDC in 2006 they announced DTrace. They handed it out; it worked. It had rough edges, but it was obviously worthy of release.
Paul Fox started hacking up DTrace for Linux in 2008. It's not perfect, and there's work to be done, but he's making progress and representing what he has appropriately.
Here's what Oracle's Linux blog had to say earlier today:
http://blogs.oracle.com/linux/entry/looking_back_at_oracle_o...
Another interesting feature we announced and is already available to Oracle Linux customers is "DTrace." We released a preview of DTrace which is made available to Oracle Linux support subscribers. Wim is also on a roll as you can see from his detailed blog entry on DTrace!