That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it.
Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add.
Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does the same as timemachine on mac, a feature that users love. Albeit stored on the same drive (but with syncoid or just manually rolled zfs send/recv scripts you can do that on another location too).
> I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root.
I don't think it's that they don't care, it's that the CDDL and BSD-ish licenses are generally believed to just not have the conflict that CDDL and GPL might. (IANAL, make your own conclusions about whether either of those are true)
Hmm yeah but that's the thing, who really cares about licenses as a user? I certainly don't. It's just some stuff that some lawyers fuss over. I don't read EULAs either nor would I even consider obeying them. The whole civil-legal world is just something I ignore.
I do have a feeling that Linux users in general care more about the GPL which is quite specific of course. Though I wonder if anyone chooses Linux for that reason.
But really personally I don't care whether companies give anything back, if anything I would love less corporate involvement in the OS I use. It was one of my main reasons for picking BSD. The others were a less fragmented ecosystem and less push to change things constantly.
True and I understand the caution considering Oracle is involved which are an awful company to do deal with (and their takeover of Sun was a disaster).
But really, this is a concern for distros. Not for end users. Yet many of the Linux users I speak to are somehow worried about this. Most can't even describe the provisions of the GPL so I don't really know what that's about. Just something they picked up, I guess.
Licensing concerns that prevent distros from using ZFS will sooner or later also have adverse effects on end users. Actually those effects are already there: The constant need to adapt a large patchset to the current kernel, meaning updates are a hassle. The lack of packaging in distributions, meaning updates are a hassle. And the lack of integration and related tooling, meaning many features can not be used (like a/b boots from snapshots after updates) easily, and installers won't know about ZFS so you have to install manually.
None of this is a worry about being sued as an end user. But all of those are worries that you life will be harder with ZFS, and a lot harder as soon as the first lawsuits hit anyone, because all the current (small) efforts to keep it working will cease immediately.
That is due to licensing reasons, yes. It makes maintaining the codebase even more complicated because when the kernel module API changes (which it very frequently does) you cannot just adapt it to your needs, you have to work around all the new changes that are there in the new version.
You have things backward. Licensing has nothing to do with it. Changes to the kernel are unnecessary. Maintaining the code base is also simplified by supporting the various kernel versions the way that they are currently supported.
Windows has a really good basis for it though, in volume shadow copy. I also don't understand why Microsoft never built a time machine based on that. Well, they kinda did but only on samba shares. But not locally.
But these days they want you to subscribe to their cloud storage so the versioning is done there, which makes sense in their commercial point of view.
I think snapshots on ZFS are better than time machine though. Time machine is a bit of a clunky mess of soft links that can really go to shit on a minor corruption. Leaving you with an unrestorable backup and just some vague error messages.
I worked a lot with macs and I've had my share of bad backups when trying to fix people's problems. I've not seen ZFS fail like that. It's really solid and tends to indicate issues before they lead to bigger problems.
Shadow Protect by StorageCraft was brilliant. Pretty sure MS actually licensed Shadow Copy from them, but I could be mistaken. It's been a while since I played in that space.
Time Machine is good for the technically savvy, but for the non-tech-savvy, without something like the AirPort Time Capsule there's no real easy configuration for it.
I can't readily tell how much of the dumbness is from the filesystem and how much from the kernel but the end result is that until it gets away from 1980s version of file locking there's no prayer. Imagine having to explain to your boss that your .docx wasn't backed up because you left Word open over the weekend. A just catastrophically idiotic design
Ah but this is really not true. Volume shadow copy makes snapshots of files and through that it can make a backup of an entire NTFS including files with a lock on them and fully quiesced. It was invented for that exact purpose. Backup software on windows leverages this functionality well. It took much longer for Linux to have something similar.
I have many criticisms of NTFS like it being really bad at handling large volumes of small files. But this is something it can do well.
The lock prevents other people from copying the file or opening it even in read only, yes. But backup software can back it up just fine.
There is an increase of posts with casual confidence in their own absolute correctnes. I originally attributed it to the influence of llms, but it is becoming so common now it is hard to dismiss.
I just mean that GPL is a bit of a religion. There are very strong opinions and principles behind it. Whereas the BSD license is more like "do whatever you want". It makes sense that the followers of the former care more deeply about it, right?
Personally I don't care about or obey any software licenses, as a user.
But this is kinda the vibe I get from other BSD users if a license discussion comes up. Maybe it's my bubble, that's possible.
I have to strongly disagree with you that GPL is a religion. While there Are certainly people who sound religious in nature when they talk about the GPL, The real reason it is important is because of what it forces developers to do on behalf of the users. It balances somewhat the power between the developer and the user.
Under other licensing, developers wield an extraordinary amount of power over the users. Yes, The user could opt not to run that code, but realistically that isn't an option in the modern day. Developers can and will abuse their access to your machine to serve their ends regardless of whether it adds value to you or not. For example, how much data collection is in nearly all modern software?
Perhaps you would argue that what I've said above only applies to a very tiny minority of users who have the technical skills to actually utilize the code, and everyone else It's just a religious argument. I don't fully disagree with that. There is another clear benefit That even those untechnical users received from the GPL, and that is the essentially forced contribution back from companies who want to build on top of it. I don't think there's any better example than the Linux kernel, which has gotten lots of contributions from companies that are otherwise very proprietary in nature and would never have open sourced things. This has benefited everyone and has acted as a rising tide lifting All boats. Without the requirements in the GPL, this most certainly would not happen.
My response to it however, is that those users still get a good amount of protection because The code is out there
Oops that last sentence (which is a sentence fragment) was supposed to be deleted, but slipped in some how and it's too late to edit. The point I was going to make was just that with the code being out there, the odds that some offensive thing the devs might do can be discovered by someone and have the issue raised. It also provides a powerful incentive to not stick something gross in there for risk of it being discovered and getting called out for it :-)
I get what you mean and probably there are people like that, but I consider it mostly an exaggeration.
Simply - the GPL has some clauses enforcing some obligations (to prevent some rights from being taken away from you, the end user - according to their wording, and I agree), these and other clauses make it legally incompatible with the inclusion of ZFS (CDDL license) in the Linux kernel (GPL). You can build it yourself (so indeed as a user you get to not care or obey) but not distribute it (this is the problem of your distribution's maintainer).
Canonical's lawyers think this is not a problem if the ZFS code is distributed as a module, instead of compiled into the kernel itself, and since 2016 Ubuntu shipped with ZFS support.
The BSD license is considered perfectly compatible with the inclusion of CDDL licensed code and therefore many BSD distros ship with ZFS (and Dtrace) out of the box without legal worries. Indeed Oracle hasn't come knocking.
TL;DR: it's not a vibe. Some licenses are compatible with each other, some aren't. It also depends on how different licenses come into play into a "finished product" (e.g. kernel module vs monolithic build)
Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add.
Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does the same as timemachine on mac, a feature that users love. Albeit stored on the same drive (but with syncoid or just manually rolled zfs send/recv scripts you can do that on another location too).