HP releases AdvFS under GPL-2

[Coleman Kane]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 13:48 -0400, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Jun 23, 2008, at 12:21, Bayard Coolidge wrote:
> 
> >  But, does AdvFS have any features now
> > that it didn't 6 years ago that are superior to, say, Ext3 or Ext4,  
> > or any other
> > filesystems available under Linux (e.g. ReiserFS, xfs, etc.)? I'd  
> > like to see that
> > question answered - has someone created a feature comparion chart?
> 
> It had some pretty neat snapshotting capabilities we used to use for  
> backups; Linux didn't have this functionality until much later with  
> LVM.  Perhaps there are still some superior aspects of AdvFS over LVM?
> 
> If so, it might be handy since ZFS isn't coming to Linux any time  
> soon, AFAICT, and some apps react poorly to NFS.  Would it be too  
> cynical to suspect that HP simply doesn't want to maintain it anymore  
> but has customers who like it?
> 
> -Bill

I saw this chattered on the FreeBSD developers list this morning. There
were comments about it being a potential solution to the lack of ZFS on
Linux (which, BTW, is well supported under FreeBSD). A quick SoTFW
reveals that there is currently a FUSE project for ZFS underway (in
Beta) to get around the CDDL-GPL incompatibilities:
http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE. Additionally, Sun has indicated
that a port to the Linux kernel is "being investigated", likely to
determine what they can and can't GPL from themselves.

I would imagine that your last paragraph is pretty close to the truth.
Facing the possibility of either losing all AdvFS clients to other
systems (Solaris or Linux), they made the play to put it out under the
GPL.

Maybe it is indicative of a larger play by HP into the Linux ring?

Link: http://advfs.sourceforge.net/

-- 
Coleman Kane
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