The CDDL also has patent clauses and so it's conceivable that a user of OpenZFS which received it in a way that violates the OpenZFS license could be liable for patent infringement of an Oracle patent. And there have been many cases of companies suing users of software over patents.
Another issue is that you should always get software like your filesystem from your distribution. We do a lot of work making sure that your systems can be safely updated, and making sure that upstream bugs are fixed for our distribution. Even community distributions put a lot of effort into that work. As someone who works on maintaining a distribution (I work for SUSE and contribute to openSUSE), I would guess that most people underestimate how much work you need to devote to maintaining the software in a distribution.
>The CDDL also has patent clauses and so it's conceivable that a user of OpenZFS which received it in a way that violates the OpenZFS license could be liable for patent infringement of an Oracle patent. And there have been many cases of companies suing users of software over patents.
Again, with usage this isn't a problem, the license could only possibly be broken by distribution with the GPL. Even then, I believe it is the GPL that is broken, so the patent clause would remain.
As for the rest of your argument, the OpenZFS team does a lot of work maintaining the filesystem. Why does that work need to come from you?
> As for the rest of your argument, the OpenZFS team does a lot of work maintaining the filesystem. Why does that work need to come from you?
Integration into our tools, backporting fixes, doing release engineering, tracking upstream changes, triaging and resolving distribution bug reports, documenting usage and troubleshooting, configuring defaults and best practices, a whole lot of testing, etc.
As I said, there's a lot of work that goes into a distribution (I probably haven't covered most of it) that most people don't think about. And that's assuming that a distribution is going to be passive about something as core as a filesystem -- which we wouldn't be. So we'd be working with upstream on development as well, which is more work. So saying something like "it's supported on distribution X" when that distribution doesn't even provide official packages for it is a massive stretch. It might work on distribution X, and you might provide independent ISV-style support for it, but it's not supported by us.
I appreciate that the sort of work distributions do isn't well-publicised (mostly because stability is hardly a sexy thing to blog about, and we don't rewrite things in JavaScript every weekend). But there is an incredible amount of work that goes into making distributions work well for users, and there's a reason that many distributions have lasted for so many years (there's a need for someone to do the boring work of packaging for you).
Another issue is that you should always get software like your filesystem from your distribution. We do a lot of work making sure that your systems can be safely updated, and making sure that upstream bugs are fixed for our distribution. Even community distributions put a lot of effort into that work. As someone who works on maintaining a distribution (I work for SUSE and contribute to openSUSE), I would guess that most people underestimate how much work you need to devote to maintaining the software in a distribution.