ZFS now available in Debian. Maybe its time to stop fighting it?
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http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html
zfs-linux will make its way into Debian Unstable soon. Maybe the FSF was wrong about ZFS all along and maybe the Trisquel team should reconsider the exclusion of ZFS packages that can be manually installed?
Sigh, no, the reporting on this is terrible. Isn't it great when people trying to mislead don't have press skills? Even the Debian package comes with a warning to people about copyright issues.
Hi t3g
ZFS is not a probelm of being right or wrong. It is about license.
As any other software, unless it is under public domain, ZFS comes with a license, a license which is called
Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
Now, GNU/Linux is an Operative system with a license called:
GNU General Public License (GPL).
This two licenses are legal documents, that tell you how can you use the software, and what happens if you distribute the software. Both are free software licenses BUT (and this is really important) that doesn't mean they are compatible.
This is because the CDDL was intentionally written in a way that wouldn't be compatible with GNU GPL. Which means that if GNU/Linux or Trisquel or even Debian or Ubuntu include software under a CDDL license they could be in legal trouble.
Now Ubuntu and Debian and many other distributions don't care and are willing to take that risk. Maybe nothing would happen. But that does not mean that they are doing something legal.
If you are interested in why they are not compatible it is because GPL has a strong copyleft, so If i write a program with a GPL license and someone else uses my code and does another program, it has to be under GPL too, it doesn't matter if my program is changed by 20 diferent people, all the 20 versions of the program will be under GPL.
In the other hand CDDL has a weak copyleft, so it respects less the users freedom. Because only the source code is free, but not other files, like the art. (This licence was based on Mozilla Public Licence MPL, the license used by Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL is the reason why many distributions use IceCat, Iceweasel or Abrowser insted of Firefox, as it does not allows you to use the name Firefox or the Logo if you wan't to make changes to the software)
Where GPL doesn't allow you to weaken the users freedom, the CDDL enforce you to weaken the users freedom, thus they are incompatible.
I hope I made my self clear.
Bottom line it is a legal issue that is not about being right or wrong. And is an important one as it is about respecting users freedom.
Robert Browning opens his poem in this text
"""
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
"""
ZFS is file system develop by sun Micro systems
But it is not compatible With the Linux kernel license
Only to bring businesses
Only to bring users
Debian comes and contrary to the principles of freedom
to put ZFS in Linux kernel
Robert Browning Continue
"""
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
"""
We all love Debian
It was an example to us
I was fighting for him
but everything changed
Robert Browning Continue
"""
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life's night begins: let him never come back to us!
"""
yes Debian is sank
it died
it must be forgotten
I am a translator!
>Debian comes and contrary to the principles of freedom
to put ZFS in Linux kernel
Debian's kernel is deblobbed and it will remain deblobbed (fully free). They put the module in contrib.
I know some people here in Brazil which are blindly advocating Debian as
a free system distribution, and this freaks me out because gNewSense
isn't getting the lead.
Some people here in Brazil advocate for gNewSense, and I support their
advocacy.
In both cases, one must understand that what you'll advocate depends on
the expertise of the listeners (future users?), you can't simply tell
people that come from Windows to use source based distributions like
Ututo, as they'll have a hard time understanding it. However, making
such ruinous compromise of recommending a non-free system distribution
is almost unacceptable if it weren't due to the fact that Debian is
(apparently) trying to comply with the GNU FSDG, but is still not
something we could safely recommend to the general public. For the
public interested in development, testing and such in-dept uses:
perhaps. But not to the general public.
There's going to be a talk advertising Debian as a 100% free system
distribution in FISL (Forum Internacional do Software Livre) this year
here in Brazil. And I will probably give up on going to all the editions
of FISL until this and other issues aren't fixed and until the
organizers don't start to follow the basic principles of
administration/management: plan, organize, "direct" (sorry, my English
skills fail me), and control. Right now, every single free software
event here in Brazil seems to be accepting advertisements for non-free
functional data or non-shareable non-functional data, for the sake of
popularity, I guess.
The only free software event that seems to have escaped from this
madness is Software Freedom Day. All the others (FLISOL (Festival
Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre), GNUGRAF, Forum
Espírito Livre, FISL, and so on) are biased.
ZFS, as it is currently shipping in Ubuntu, opens it up to controversy since it is an enabled kernel module that Canonical ships with each kernel update. There is also another method of getting ZFS by manually installing the packages which more people are comfortable with like how Debian is doing it by compiling from source and creating a DKMS module.
The Trisquel team's goal is to remove anything ZFS related from the repositories, so you don't have the option to install the free software without resorting to 3rd party repositories or PPAs. The majority of users who want ZFS aren't probably going to use Trisquel (or even be aware of it), so its not THAT bad, but the Trisquel team is unwilling to compromise with anything related to ZFS due to stigma and fear of agitating the strict political atmosphere of the FSF.
While there is a difference in how Canonical and the Debian Project are handling this -- Canonical, as we all know, has it pre-compiled while the Debian Project provides source code that is compiled when someone installs the package -- this difference doesn't actually matter.
For comparison I'll call what the Debian Project is doing the "We'll Let The Users Do It" method.
Let's put ZFS aside for a moment and remember some free software history.
Think back to the days of Steve Jobs and Objective C. Another GPL-incompatible license was in use and the proposal was also the "We'll Let The Users Do It." That wasn't accepted as a way around the requirements to put it under a GPL-compatible license back then, and nothing has changed with the GPL that makes such an answer to GPL incompatibility acceptable now. (We now have Objective C support because the GPL was strong enough to require this and not allow "We'll Let The User Do It" as a loophole around its requirements.)
The more important question is whether (and how) the software is intended to interface with each other. As I explained in the other thread, the fact that you need a bunch of files from the kernel to satisfy the #include directives in order to compile it at all, along with the fact that it uses internal kernel interfaces and not the system call interface all point to it being a part of/a derivative of the kernel and so subject to the GPL's requirements.
Debian's approach is much less evasive than the Ubuntu one and is more ideal. Why does ZFS need to be installed by default for desktop users? It is more of a server technology and if you are tech savvy enough to know how to use and administer ZFS, you are more than willing to manually install a package or compile from source manually for your specific setup.
It shows that Canonical is more interested in phones and servers than desktops since that is where they can lock in service contracts and trademark licensing. It's a shame that Unity 8 is STILL not in a usable state on the desktop after many promises and Ubuntu 16.10 will not have it by default when it is released in October.
We will see if Snap packages are adopted at all or remain in the Ubuntu ecosystem along with Unity and Mir.
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