David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
On Sun, August 15, 2010 20:44, Peter Jeremy wrote:
Irrespective of the above, there is nothing requiring Oracle to release
any future btrfs or ZFS improvements (or even bugfixes). They can't
retrospectively change the license on already released code but they
can put a different (non-OSS) license on any new code.
That's true.
However, if Oracle makes a binary release of BTRFS-derived code, they must
release the source as well; BTRFS is under the GPL.
So, if they're going to use it in any way as a product, they have to
release the source. If they want to use it just internally they can do
anything they want, of course.
Technically Oracle could release a non-GPL version of btrfs, if they
removed (and presumably re-wrote) all the non-Oracle commits to the
source. An author is allowed to release programs under multiple
licenses simultaneously, so if Oracle only uses the Oracle developed
btrfs code, they could re-release as binary only. Sorting this out and
re-writing the code written by others is probably more work than it is
worth for Oracle so they probably won't do it. Oracle wouldn't gain any
friends doing this and would expose themselves to a lot a scrutiny as a
lot a people watch for GPL violators (this action would be a big yellow
flag to the other btrfs contributors to look for GPL violations).
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