Dear Larry,
I know that you have no idea who I am. That’s OK. Even so, I would like to request that you please place the ZFS file system under the GPL license. In case you don’t know the ZFS file system is a nice, shiny file system that is part of the Solaris operating system that you acquired along with the rest of Sun’s assets last month.
ZFS has some really nice built in features for a file system. This includes my favorite feature – the ability to take a snapshot of a file system partition that is in use. While this can be done under Linux through the use of LVM, it’s a bit of a hack (although a hack I appreciate LVM developers!!). Having it all incorporated into the file system would be really nifty.
Currently ZFS is licensed under CDDL. The problem is that this license isn’t compatible with the more typical GPL license. Oh, and there is 56 patents relating to ZFS. I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of patents, but unless the code is released under GPL there is no way it can be incorporated into Linux. Can I be honest? All this license talk gives me a headache. Let’s break this down so I can understand it. Do you know how many systems out there run Linux, Larry? If ZFS became the de facto file system for Solaris, OS X and Linux you would rule the world! Just think about all those machines out there running your code. You would be bigger than Bill. Just a thought 
I am sure there are some really smart people at Oracle who could figure out how accomplish this in no time. Just send out the proper email and it could be done in a week I bet. One little act and you would build a huge pile of credibility in a snap. And yes, “huge pile” is a technical term for “lots”.
While I certainly can’t speak for Oracle database administrators, I am willing to bet that those who run Oracle on Linux would love this also. It’s not just us MySQL people who could use ZFS.
All of us who use Linux on a daily basis would really appreciate it. Just one less thing to worry about.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Keith
“Just a MySQL DBA out here in the trenches”
