When will we can use ZFS v24?

[Tom Evans]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Dan Nelson <dnelson at allantgroup.com> wrote:
> In the last episode (Apr 08), Garrett Cooper said:
>> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>> > On Apr 8, 2010, at 2:18 PM, krad wrote:
>> > [ ... ]
>> >>> is that even possible with CDDL?
>> >>
>> >> im not a lawyer but it wouldn't surprise me
>> >
>> > I'm not a lawyer either, but I was active in reviewing and suggesting
>> > changes to CDDL submission for OSI approval back in 2004.
>> >
>> > A copyright owner always has the ability to relicense their code under
>> > other terms, but existing code is guaranteed to be available,
>> > redistributable to others, etc under the terms of the current version of
>> > CDDL; in particular see:
>> >
>> > If Oracle chooses, they might make future changes to the ZFS source code
>> > under different or more restrictive licensing terms, but what's
>> > available now is always going to be available.
>>
>> The same of basic principle applies to BDB; originally it was BSD licensed
>> in 1.x under FreeBSD, then GPLed in 2.x+ (IIRC), then left to pasture in
>> 4.x after Oracle acquired Sleepycat DB.  MySQL is GPLv2 today...  who
>> knows what it might be tomorrow...
>
> BDB was never GPL'ed; it was and still is BSD-licensed.
>
> http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/htdocs/oslicense.html
>

IANAL, but that is not a BSD license. It is the Sleepycat license,
which is compatible with GPL.

The giveaway is in section 3:

 * 3. Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on
 *    how to obtain complete source code for the DB software and any
 *    accompanying software that uses the DB software.

The '.. any accompanying software' clause makes it quite like the GPL.

Cheers

Tom