HP releases AdvFS under GPL-2

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Mon Jun 23 14:29:07 EDT 2008


On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 12:21 PM, Bayard Coolidge <n1ho at yahoo.com> wrote:
> That said, I'm wondering aloud what AdvFS would bring to the Open Source
> table.

  Well, pure speculation on my part here, but:

  I'm guessing keeping the filesystem code as proprietary did not
generate any revenue for HP.  Publishing the code as FOSS gets HP some
press mention.  That likely gets attention from technically minded
people who might otherwise be ignoring HP products and services.  So
this might be nothing more than a marketing expense.

  I knew nothing of AdvFS before this news, but the brochure feature
set sounds similar to Sun's ZFS.  Sun has FOSS'ed the ZFS code, but
only under a license incompatible with the GPL the Linux kernel uses.
Now along comes HP with something similar that can be ported directly
into Linux.  That's marketing leverage.  If AdvFS gets into the
kernel, HP can say to Sun, "Nyah nyah, we're in the kernel and you're
not!"  (Zealots, please note: How accurate or fair that would be is
irrelevant.)

  There's also the fact that at various times over the past several
years, HP's top management has appeared pretty keen to kill off their
proprietary hardware (Alpha, PA-RISC) and operating system (OSF/1,
HP-UX) product lines.  This may be part of a migration-to-Linux
strategy.  It's easier to change OSes if you can keep the same disks
and filesystems.

> ... has someone created a feature comparion chart?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

  (Accuracy not verified by me.)

> However, it's delightful to see that HP is releasing it under GPL, though.
> I'm very encouraged to see that, and hope the trend will continue!

  <AOL>Me too.</AOL>

-- Ben


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