lymeca - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Partners with OIN "To Help Linux Thrive (groklaw.net)

Submitted by

lymeca

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @05:01AM

lymeca writes: "Groklaw reports that Google has become the Open Invention Network's first end user licensee. The OIN was established by companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and somewhat ironically Novell to accumulate patents and license them royalty free to any company who promises not to leverage their own patent portfolio against key applications available on GNU/Linux, including many GNU projects as well as Linux itself. As Chris DiBona, Google's open source programs manager puts it:

Linux plays a vital role at Google, and we're strongly committed to supporting the Linux developer community. We believe that by becoming an Open Invention Network licensee, we can encourage Linux development and foster innovation in a way that benefits everyone. We're proud to participate in OIN's mission to help Linux thrive.
This marks an important and symbolic step forward in the battle between Free/Open Source Software and the looming specter of software patent infringements in nations which recognise them. Google's support bolsters the OIN's effectiveness as a shield against patent attacks against GNU/Linux and many popular applications which run on it."

Submission + - ZFS on Linux: It's alive! (linuxworld.com)

Submitted by lymeca on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @02:30AM

lymeca writes: LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem's ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incanartion in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there's hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer.

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