I swear, this is not another Unixfication post
Photo: Jeff Bonwick and Linus Torvalds
I was resolved not to write another Unixfication story until I had more concrete news of Sun and Linus actually working together, and filed it away under "Maybe". Like many of the speculative peices I write, it was a thought exercise with the objective of "shaking the tree" so to speak.
Well, that's where it was all going to stay, until I was sent this email by Jim Grisanzio, OpenSolaris community lead over the weekend:
"hey ... I have no idea what's going on but since you are interested in this topic I thought you'd enjoy these pics (on Jeff Bonwick's blog):
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick
For all of you not up on Solaris digerati, Jeff Bonwick is Chief Technical Officer of Storage Technology at Sun. Translation: He's in charge of ZFS, one of the crown jewels in the Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris technology stack.
ZFS, like all of OpenSolaris's components, is licensed under the CDDL. Linux is licensed under GPLv2. Sun has been making various allusions that the licensing of OpenSolaris -might- change to GPL, most likely GPLv3.
Is Sun talking with Linus about moving ZFS to GPLv2, with the objective of fast tracking ZFS into a native Linux kernel implementation of the file system driver? Or is Linus considering moving the kernel to GPLv3, with Sun doing the same for OpenSolaris? Is Linux and Solaris DNA going to swap much quicker than previously thought?
Stay Tuned.
Is Unixfication just a figment of Perlow's wild imagination or have we now seen the Smoking Gun? Talk Back and let me know.