That license "mania" is important. Just because it restricts you from doing certain things you wish you could doesn't mean the license itself is wrong.
RMS once commented that he used OSS not because its better right now, but that by using it (and of course, supporting its development), OSS would be better someday.
I guess if you're a startup and trying to be lean and agile and pragmatic, it kind of sucks, but as a human being, who gets to make decisions where one don't need to optimize for ROI, I think its important to recognize what this is: an opportunity. Improve existing tools, maybe help convince Sun to change their license, learn BSD, any of a number of options.
This isn't because Linux is a license nazi or anything. GNU (and with it, Linux) exists for a number of reasons, but I think at least some of the people working on it push it because of the way the license operates.
In short: feature, not a bug.
(PS: this isn't an attack on you; I'm just kind of frustrated that people always have this complaint about ZFS. Sun made ZFS, and open sourced it out of their own good graces. Linus and hundreds and thousands of other people made Linux, and distribute that source out of their own good graces. This isn't a "well why don't you write a patch" rant, as much as it is licenses and laws and all that boring stuff exists for a very important reason, and its important to be mindful of the effects it has on you as a human and as a programmer. If you don't like the way it works, please try to participate in the democratic process and make your voice heard through other means as well.)
I'm wondering if anybody here at HN is using ZFS for a file server (and pretty much nothing else). Like many others, I'm so impressed with ZFS, but otherwise have little incentive to switch over the rest of my computing life from Linux to (Open)Solaris. However, ZFS is so cool, I have many "appliance" uses in mind, from real business-y apps, to simple home networked storage. Anybody making frankenstacks out there with Linux and ZFS?
I have found ZFS to be very good for my uses. I do intend to put together a system that will have lots of disks and then use Gigabit Ethernet to serve up iSCSI (CentOS etc. support it out of the box), which you can set up with a few ZFS commands. (Have not done this yet however)
You can still use ZFS on linux using fuse so unless you want to boot off of it, you should be able to use it for any file server needs when it becomes stable.
A better option would be using freeBSD with ZFS. FreeBSD has much better support for ZFS as they don't care about the licensing issue (though the support is still experimental). Since freeBSD is (in the marginal case) more stable and secure than linux, it would make more sense for a home server anyway.
Thanks for the fuse info. (Point for you!) I didn't know about that. As for FreeBSD... I actually know OpenSolaris better than FreeBSD, so if I left Linux altogether, I'd probably just use it.
I guess I'm especially curious about people who are using standalone (Open)Solaris ZFS fileservers, and how they're accessing it from non Solaris OS's.
Caveat: FUSE is very slow for ZFS. Use it only to check out the features, but if you run it (hypothetically) on something important, be mindful of the limitations.
